


the colder kiss of steel

by stitchingatthecircuitboard



Series: the mercy cut [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Gen, Leia Naberrie, Luke Naberrie, Multi, THEY ARE ALL SO SMALL.....except clone wars era characters...who are adults?.? baffling, [stretches fingers] gettin ahead with ye olde character and relationship tags, anyways poll: who wants jyn/enfys in the future, can’t believe i forgot to tag my Naberrie twins smh, i can't be trusted to write straights....I introduce one more lady and the gay just takes over.....
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-25 22:25:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14388372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stitchingatthecircuitboard/pseuds/stitchingatthecircuitboard
Summary: Luke does what he always does when faced with something wrong: he tries to make it right. He’s not very good at it, but it’s like his love for Leia. He doesn’t know how not to try.





	1. one: luke

**Author's Note:**

> AAAAAAAAAAND WE’RE BACK!
> 
> as always, chapter count is a rough guesstimate, character and relationship tags to be updated.
> 
> warnings! parental separation, fascism, canon typical violence, canon typical slavery (but actually talked about, AHEM GEORGE), some (vague) descriptions of war violence and prison/labor camps.
> 
> also I’m moving back to America so the extra u’s are gone from my spelling. Whoops!

Luke knows a lot of things. He knows how to fly a speeder; he knows how to clean that one persistent patch of rust from Artoo that’s really Dagobah’s fault; he knows he is loved. He knows his sister is the best being in the Galaxy, and does not know how not to love her.

He knows this, too: if Leia is sick, it’s a sign of the apocalypse, no matter what Mama says about it being normal for kids to get sick. Leia and Luke don’t get sick; it’s a Force thing, and a vaccinated-to-Byss-and-back thing, and a them thing. Luke knows that they haven’t changed, nor has their vaccination status—Mom has a schedule programmed into Threepio, which he periodically frets over, and which ensures that they get their hypos on time. 

But the Force is quiet and cold around him, and even as he presses his brow to Leia’s and promises to bring her chocolate, he knows that something is terribly, inevitably wrong.

So Luke does what he always does when faced with something wrong: he tries to make it right. He’s not very good at it, but it’s like his love for Leia. He doesn’t know how not to try. 

 

 

Cyphar is familiar in a dusty, neglected sort of way. Not much happens here; the Empire doesn’t have much of a presence here, like they do in Javin, the next system over, and tensions between human colonizers, Twi’lek immigrants, and indigenous Cyphari have mostly worn down into a well-marked groove. The Cyphari stay at Afe; the humans and Twi’lek occupy Hollenside, except for carefully negotiated trade days. This is when Cody organizes the resupply missions: with so many people wandering around, from nearby systems and far-flung settlements, a few more humans won’t be a strange sight.

Mom holds his hand firmly, not afraid, but not letting go, either. Uncle Obi-Wan walks on his other side, hood drawn up over his face, so that only the tip of his nose and a coppery bristle of beard poke out. They’ve got the repulsor cart with them, so they won’t have to carry anything. There’s too much to get, anyway, if they’re going to be in space for another few months, for them to just carry everything back. 

When they get to the trading post, Mom directs them quietly to the Cyphari side of the market. Luke knows this, too: the legacy of the Naboo, a legacy that echoes sourly here, is one of colonization. Mom worked to foster relations with the Gungans while she was Queen, and her successors—Jamillia, Neeyutnee, Apailana, Kylantha—have maintained that work. But this does not change the facts of history. When the family works on a colonized planet, they prefer to deal directly with the indigenous beings; only once that relationship has been established do they begin talks with the colonizers. 

Luke loves markets. He loves the bustle of beings, the murmur of languages from across the galaxy, the excitement of finding something new to bring back to the _Spark_. His enjoyment is undiminished by the irate, flickering presence of Leia at the tips of his fingers; he has to remember it all really well, so that he can share it with her later. 

Mom’s got the list, but it’s Obi-Wan who guides them from one stall to another. They buy sacks of dried fruit, brown rice and farra seeds; nuts and flash-frozen vegetables and fish. Luke finds a crate of meiloorun for sale, and tugs Obi-Wan over; Mom points him to a joola vendor, and, remembering Mama’s advice, Luke asks for a cup to store in their freezer. He’s not exactly clear how the family gets credits, but he thinks it has to do with Naboo and his grandparents and the Queens. In any case, Mama isn’t worried about it, and that’s good enough for him. If Mama worried, that’s probably another sign of the apocalypse. 

Luke reaches out for Leia every so often. It’s hard, with her sickness dampening her sense of the Force, but it’s harder being apart from her. Obi-Wan says this is an opportunity to practice separation: they can't rely on always being together, and this is a safe environment. A resupply on Cyphar takes about two hours in total; he’ll be back with Leia before Cody’s finished all the new _Dex’s Diner_ episodes with her. 

But no matter what Obi-Wan says, Luke can’t bring himself to seriously consider separation from Leia. Their bond is as incontrovertible as a law of physics: gravity pulls, mass is conserved, energy blooms into entropy, and Leia and Luke will always be together. She is his sister, one half himself. He cannot imagine a galaxy without her. 

He can still feel her anyway, tuning in and out like a faulty comm channel. She’s there, right where she should be; when she isn’t, all he has to do is wait. 

 

 

Chocolate is hard to find on Cyphar. This isn’t new. It doesn’t help that the vendors are constantly changing, moving on or out, or that off-world goods are primarily delivered by smugglers. There’s not a lot of certainty, is the point, and while normally this is an adventure—always something new to try—right now, with Leia so miserable, it’s a trial. 

“This,” says Obi-Wan sternly, when Luke says as much to him, “is not a trial.”

“Not in the Jedi or judicial senses,” Luke objects, “but it’s a challenge! A hardship!”

Mom pauses to adjust the repulsor cart; he catches the twitch of her smile before she turns her head, and her hand, when it returns to his shoulder, squeezes with affection. 

“A lack of chocolate is not a challenge,” says Obi-Wan. “It is an inconvenience at best.”

“Spoken like someone without a uterus,” Mom says, wry like a joke, and even if Luke doesn’t really get it, he grins at her brightly. Obi-Wan just sighs, and keeps his peace.

Necessities acquired, Mom steers them towards a few niceties. She spends a few moments stroking a length of emerald synth silk, and tests a few samples of lotion—it gets so dry in space—on her hand, and Luke’s. Obi-Wan peruses a shelf of datapads and power converters, which is more immediately interesting than silk, and Luke stretches to his tiptoes to look at them, mimicking Obi-Wan’s pensive frown as best he can. The vendor catches him at it, and winks; Luke grins impulsively back. 

It’s then that he sees a shaded stall packed high with pastries and sweets. This is the place, he knows: if anywhere on Cyphar is going to have chocolate, it’s this place. 

He tugs Obi-Wan’s robe. “Mama gave me the credits,” he says imploringly. “Can I get some chocolate—for Leia?”

It’s just across the path, in plain view. He’s ten, and Cyphar is as safe as anywhere they’ve been. 

“Let’s go, then,” says Obi-Wan, because he has never once not been overprotective of them, and walks Luke over to the stall, catching Mom’s eye as they go. 

“You’re going to have to let us grow up sometime,” Luke points out, a snag of Leia’s perpetual irritation catching in his voice. 

“I know,” Obi-Wan says. “But that doesn’t have to be today. And—there is something in the Force. Do you—”

The world shatters.

Luke doesn’t hear the rest of the question, because the ground shudders; a few paths over, something explodes violently. He’s thrown to the ground, bloodying his cheek on the dirt. His vision, for a brief moment, goes staticky black. _Leia!_ he thinks in a panic, reaching for her instinctively, and feels her thrashing on the other end of their bond. There’s another explosion, and too-close blaster fire, screams from traders and vendors and those just passing through: the air bleeds terror from a thousand hearts. 

His head aches, his heart hurts. He’s always been more sensitive to emotions, or so Obi-Wan has said, of himself and Leia, and right now he feels overrun, caught and tied and spread thin and scraped raw by fear and pain and confusion. The market screams, Cyphar screams; the Force screams, too. At the _Spark_ , too far away to help, far enough to be safe, Leia screams for him. Luke’s hands press themselves over his mouth, fingernails digging into his cheeks painfully. _War zone,_ he remembers; keep quiet, keep safe.

Luke drags himself to his knees, like pulling himself free from a tractor beam, and crawls dizzily to hide behind an overturned crate. 

Mom, where’s Mom—Uncle Obi—Leia, Leia, have to get back to Leia— _where’s Mom—_

Protocol, _remember the protocols, Luke—get back to the rendezvous—if they don’t make it, get back to the ship—don’t look back—_

Terror parches his mouth, sends his blood fizzing through shaking limbs. Rendezvous, that’s the monument in the plaza near the eastern edge of the outpost—he knows how to get there. Luke dares a glance up over the crate, catches a glimpse of shining white armor, turned away from him. _Bucket heads,_ he thinks furiously, and drops to his belly again, crawling through the mess of upturned wares and shattered stalls in what he hopes is east. 

And then—

Obi-Wan is face-down two meters away. _Don’t look back_ , Auntie Dormé had told him, time and again— _the most important thing is to get yourself to safety, do you understand me?_ But Luke can’t leave Obi-Wan behind anymore than he could leave Dormé or Mom or Leia behind, not if there’s a chance—

His heart pounds in his ears, drowning out the screams. Luke crawls back, closer to the fighting—and why are the Imps here? Javin’s got Imperial presence, but Cyphar has never interested them—towards Obi-Wan, _get to Uncle Obi, get to the rendezvous, get Mom, get home. Figure it out later._

It takes him far too long to find a pulse: his hands won’t stop shaking, which might actually be what rouses Obi-Wan back to consciousness. 

“Uncle Obi,” Luke whispers, jostling him roughly. Obi-Wan is not tall, exactly, but Luke is tiny. “You gotta get up—we have to go—”

Obi-Wan pushes himself grimly upright, but his eyes are unfocused. _Concussion,_ Luke thinks, and wishes he could concentrate enough to remember Luminara’s and B’s lessons—once they’re safe, Leia will help him, but Leia’s sick, Leia’s having trouble with the Force—

—Leia is _screaming_ in the Force—

“Come _on,”_ Luke says, shrilly—he knows he sounds shrill, can hear the childish panic in his own voice, when just minutes ago he’d told Obi-Wan that he needed to let the twins grow up— “Obi-Wan—we gotta _go—”_

They go, staggering through the ruined market. There’s blood crusting over Obi-Wan’s unfocused blue eyes, matted into his eyebrows, and the sight of it terrifies Luke more than it should—head wounds bleed, that’s what they _do,_ get it together—

Mom is nowhere to be seen. Luke tries, and fails, not to think about it.

“Luke,” Obi-Wan murmurs, “—do you feel that?”

Cold.

Luke gasps, clutches tighter to Obi-Wan, where they’re holding each other up. “Hurry,” he begs, but Obi-Wan pulls gracelessly to a stop. He turns and looks at the trail of destruction behind them. The cold eats at them, worse than Mirial, worse than space—

And then—something focusses on him, some great, terrible attention swung to scrutinize him, Luke, just him—

“Come _on,”_ Luke wails, tugging at Obi-Wan’s arm— “we have to go, we have to run—”

“Yes,” says Obi-Wan. “Luke—run, back to the ship, tell them to take off without us— _run!”_

“Not without you!” Luke cries in terror—that was the whole point, no one gets left behind—and _Mom—_

_“RUN!”_ Obi-Wan shouts, the Force rushing up into that one word, and Luke stumbles back with the sheer strength of it. The cold edges closer, the attention more intent—Obi-Wan sheds his robe, and Luke runs.

But he doesn’t run far.

In the distance, blaster fire still sounds; something explodes, but the violence is muted in the waiting calm. Luke drops behind another crate, and watches, and waits. 

The moment stretches—a heartbeat, a thousand heartbeats—and snaps. Flanked by two troopers, a man in black appears at the end of the path. A black helmet covers his face; a red lightsaber burns in his hand. 

Obi-Wan sways where he stands, but raises his own hand; blue light ignites, a piece of sky forged into a weapon. 

The man takes a step forward; Obi-Wan holds his ground, and the man continues until they are just outside the reach of each other's blades. The troopers stand guard at the end of the path, blasters at the ready. Everything in their stance snarls that they will intervene if necessary.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Obi-Wan,” says the man in black. “We meet again, at last.”

“I apologize,” says Obi-Wan. “I don’t recall meeting someone with such a ridiculous helmet.”

“You look worse for the wear,” says the man, as if Obi-Wan hadn’t spoken. “What a pity. I had hoped this would be as equal a match as possible, given my new powers.”

“Well, I’d like to say it’s the wear of betrayal and fascism,” says Obi-Wan, “but I’ve been a bit blown up. I do promise to do my best.”

“You haven’t changed at all,” the man says. The cold flares around him; it’s looking for Luke, without knowing who or why. Luke shudders, violent, involuntary. “Who are you protecting this time?”

“Can’t old friends and new enemies stop for a chat once an invasion or so?”

“It’s not an invasion—” the man starts, and stills, head canted to the side as if listening. It’s uncanny, the familiarity of that gesture; Leia does the exact same thing when she’s searching something out in the Force. The cold draws closer, coiling like a snake; Luke draws tight into himself, like Obi-Wan and Socks have taught him.

When the man speaks again, it’s lower, strained and angry. “Where is she?”

“I have no idea,” says Obi-Wan.

_“LIAR!”_ shouts the man. Luke shudders again; the cold grows teeth and claws. 

“Search your feelings—” Obi-Wan begins, but then the man attacks.

Luke can’t watch, can’t tear his eyes away. The red blade moves too quickly for him to track it, more a blur than a sword. Obi-Wan, despite his injuries, meets his attacker stroke for stroke, parry and riposte, attack and counterattack, a conversation between two people who already know what the other will say. 

But Obi-Wan is injured; he cannot sustain his defense.

The red blade slips past his guard. The blue lightsaber drops to the ground, extinguished, a hand falling open around its hilt. Obi-Wan, with a ragged cry, falls to his knees, cradling his arm to his chest. 

“The circle is now complete,” the man says quietly. “When I left you, I was still a learner. Now— _I_ am the master.”

“Are you?” Obi-Wan asks. “Are you really, Anakin?”

The cold twists like a whip with fury; the red blade descends; Luke moves before he can think about it, a scream echoing around him. He shoves Obi-Wan out of the way with desperate strength, and screws his eyes shut, bracing for the cold fire to take him.

It doesn’t. 

Luke opens his eyes, breath still trapped in his lungs. The cold falls back. The red blade hisses as it’s extinguished and clipped to the man’s belt. The gloved hand that had held it reaches up to pull off the helmet; the man kneels before him.

Anakin Skywalker stares at him, eyes an odd green. The intent focus of his gaze paralyzes; Luke is frozen in fear. “You—” Anakin says softly, as if to himself. “I know you, don’t I?”

—and Leia breaks through him, his eyes her own, her panic and her own terror swallowing him up— _the path to the dark side—_

The man’s unsettling eyes narrow. “Who—?”

Luke shoves Leia from his mind, terror making him clumsy, lending him an urgent bruising force, _protect **protect** her, keep her safe, tell nothing—_

A memory rises up between them, between Luke and Leia, in the cold shadow of the Force— _one cannot be brave without first being afraid._

And: _if you ever meet your father, and you fear for your life, you must tell him who you are._

“Tell me,” Anakin Skywalker says, and the Force gathers at his fingertips like a thunderstorm, and Luke knows—it’s now or never. There is only once chance.

_Goodbye, Leia._

“You know who I am,” he whispers, and coughs on dust, on the tears that will come as soon as he can afford them, as he ruins the best thing in his life, in the galaxy, as he destroys part of himself so that Leia can live. Leia must be safe, must be protected; their father must not know of her; Luke will break them apart to protect her, their whole family, no matter how much Leia’s anguish hurts him, no matter how much it feels like tearing himself in two and drowning in pain. 

He swallows. “My name is Luke Skywalker-Naberrie. I’m your son.”

Anakin is still as stone, as the eye of a sandstorm on Tatooine. His eyes burn blue in the sunshine. Behind Luke, Obi-Wan is unmoving; Luke can detect a pulse of life, but not much more. _Please be alright, please be faking,_ he thinks.

“My—” says Anakin very quietly, and then, “Luke. Luke.” His hands spasm at his sides. “Where is your mother, Luke?”

Luke can’t help the way his voice shakes. “I don’t know.”

“You were in the market together,” Anakin says to himself, and rises abruptly. “Appo! Fox!”

The two stormtroopers approach immediately.

Anakin turned away, barking orders, Luke drops to his knees, and crawls again to Obi-Wan. “Wake up,” he whispers, and can’t help the tears welling in his eyes. “Please— _please_ , Obi-Wan—wake up—”

Obi-Wan is breathing, but he doesn’t respond—truly unconscious this time, injury and fatigue and shock catching up to him. A shadow falls across them both; Luke looks up into the darkness blotting out the sun.

There’s a long moment stretching between them, Luke staring into the darkness and the darkness staring back at him, before the shadow resolves itself, crouching down next to him with dark blond hair and eyes as blue as a Tatooine sky.

“Who—” Anakin clears his throat. “Who is he, to you?”

Luke scrubs at his eyes. He doesn’t need the Force to tell him that Obi-Wan’s life depends on his answer. “Uncle Obi,” he says, and wills his voice not to crack. “My father’s brother.”

Anakin twitches next to him. The lightsaber remains unlit at his belt. 

“Okay,” Anakin says at last. “Okay. Come on.”

“I can’t _leave_ him,” Luke protests, his voice finally breaking as Anakin pulls him to his feet. 

“If we take him, it will be to an Imperial prison and then a public execution,” Anakin says coldly. “If you truly want him to be alright—”

“I’ll stay with him,” Luke says, and jerks against the grip on his arm, tight as manacles. “I’ll help—I’ll wait—”

The grip on his hands loosens and falls away. Anakin crouches before him again. 

“Luke,” he says, a barely-hidden bite of impatience to his words, “this is a war zone.”

Luke stares at him incredulously. The entire Galaxy is a war zone—and Anakin’s the one who brought it _here!_

“I can’t leave you alone here,” Anakin continues. “Your mother would kill me.”

_Mom’s already tried to kill you,_ Luke thinks hysterically: she and Anakin have been fighting on opposite sides of a war as long as Luke’s been alive. Whether or not Anakin leaves Luke alone in a war zone will not really change Mom’s priorities, as far as Anakin’s death is concerned. 

Instinct hardened by habit has him pushing these thoughts to Leia, as he always does, because Leia is brilliant and funny and with him, always, who else would he share anything with? But—but she’s not here, and the wound of her absence, like a missing limb, causes him to stumble. Only Anakin’s hands catch him and keep him upright.

“You need a medic,” Anakin says gently. “I’ll take you back to my shuttle.”

He can’t ask Leia’s advice, but he can consider her point of view. What would Leia do?

Leia would already have bitten Anakin for trying to touch her, she’d already have kicked him and grabbed Obi-Wan’s lightsaber and staggered under its weight, or kicked him and grabbed Luke and run, because Leia is quicker than he is, and more willing to risk violence, and it’s so much easier to be brave for others than for yourself.

Ask, instead: what would Mom do?

Mom would have grabbed the lightsaber, too, but she wouldn’t have ignited it: she would have hung back, looking for her options and weighing them against one another.

This, Luke can do.

_I can’t leave you alone in a war zone,_ Anakin had said, _your mother would kill me_ : so counter that, point by point, just like Mom had taught him.

First, Luke’s not alone—but, if he explains the _Spark_ and the family, can he trust Anakin not to imprison or murder Mama? Cody? Can he be trusted to leave Leia alone? No. He cannot even ask for that assurance; to do so would endanger the family, and by extension, the Alliance.

Second, Anakin has a very skewed idea of Mom’s priorities, if he thinks she’d rather Luke go with him than stay with Obi-Wan. But this, too, Luke can’t say: Anakin was ready to kill Obi-Wan just for being in his path earlier; Anakin is deeply possessive and protective of people he considers his own, like Socks had said; Anakin will not react well to Luke, and by extension, Mom, choosing Obi-Wan over him.

There’s only one way to keep Leia safe, to keep the Alliance alive. The alternative is unthinkable. It’s no choice at all: Dormé had said this to him, once, describing an interrogation with their father, Dormé herself caught between truth and love, and Luke finally understands what she meant. He would not be himself if he chose otherwise. This is the only choice _he_ can make.

But that doesn’t mean he has to make it blindly.

Luke grabs at the synthleather of Anakin’s tabard, curling his hand around it; he doesn’t flinch when Anakin’s hand seizes his own instantaneously. “You’ll keep me safe?” 

Anakin’s grip falls away, his face cracking like a mask. “Always,” he says, like a promise.

“Even from the Emperor?” Luke asks. He has to be sure.

Something complicated flits across Anakin’s face at that. But he still says: “Yes.”

Luke scrubs his eyes again, and takes Anakin’s hand. “Okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ****drumroll****
> 
> some Thoughts with which I would like to leave you all:
> 
> \+ Ahsoka Tano is Literally The Messiah  
> \+ i caught up on the new season of a series of unfortunate events and the entire time i was thinking....sunny baudelaire is leia skywalker-naberrie as an infant...  
> \+ thank you all SO MUCH for your heartwarming comments! I was travelling & without internet for the last couple weeks (& will be again in the next few weeks) which is Great for fic-writing but...bad...for replying to comments...  
> \+ just know that I Love and Appreciate you all  
> \+ speaking of comments, just to throw this out there w/o naming names...I am Definitively Not Interested in proclaiming Anakin Skywalker’s blamelessness for the Empire. That is not a view I hold or will ever hold. Anakin is a tragic figure, but he sure ain’t an innocent one. If that’s your jam, this is the wrong fic series for you, and I kindly invite you to go elsewhere, or at least restrain yourself in the comments. You Know Who You Are. don’t make me mod, please, i’m so overwhelmed with Life
> 
> up next: VENTRESSSSSSSSSSSS being a badass, being Tragically Gay™️, and ~~events being set into motion~~~


	2. two: asajj

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Keep count of your debts, precious girl,_ Mother Talzin had hissed in her ear, that long-past night when Asajj was martyred into slavery. _That is the only road to freedom._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS: discussions of slavery and trafficking; time spent in a labor/concentration camp; a gendered slur (used by one female character against another); references to imperialism and genocide on Tatooine; war-/canon-typical violence (more graphic than it’s been before in the series).
> 
> Asajj Ventress, whose POV grounds this chapter, is a fascinating character, but she is not a nice one. I’ve tried to honor her complexity and her background, and that necessarily led to some dark places. PLEASE be safe & take care of yourselves, & drop me a line in the comments if I’ve missed a warning or you want more info on what the warning applies to. I’m happy to help.

Things go as they always do, in Asajj’s experience: bad. The modification is important—Dooku’d always needled her about her speech until he’d been satisfied that she wouldn’t embarrass him—but: bad, not badly. The two are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they mutually dependent. Things go badly, in deviations from a plan, in degrees of unsuccessfulness. It is usually immediately clear when they start to go badly. When they go bad, they rot, sour like failure curdling in the stomach. 

Things often go badly. This is how Asajj found herself in an Imperial labor camp. But they always go bad, and this is how Asajj found herself face to face with Ahsoka Tano, _again._

 

 

Tatooine is starfire hot, its two suns blazing down unmercifully. Asajj keeps her head covered, like the rest of her. In the years she’s lived here, she’s grown resentfully accustomed to the chafe of homespun against her arms. The chafe of sand in the wind is worse. 

The debt she owes is worst of all. It’s the reason she’s on this Force-forsaken lump of dust and spite, it’s the reason she’s clad so unfashionably—another learned habit relentlessly taught by Dooku—and, most offensively, it’s the reason she’d risen with the moons and ridden halfway across the continent to the Jundland Wastes, and is now waiting in the noonday heat for a message too sensitive to holo and too urgent to take the time for a nice schedule full of sleep at appropriate intervals. It’s bad enough that her regular job runs her ragged; she doesn’t need this doing so, too.

Except: who’s she kidding? Whatever Ahsoka asks is Asajj’s job. This included.

Eventually, a speeder approaches on the horizon, and zooms steadily closer until it swerves to a stop. Its rider dismounts, shakes out her robes, and pulls off her helmet.

“You’re late,” says Asajj acerbically. 

“Sorry,” says Barriss Offee, not sounding sorry at all. “Ran into some trouble at Mos Eisley. You know how it is.”

Asajj does know how it is; she’s a very big reason why the Hutts are so suspicious of new vessels. She refuses to concede the point on principle, though. She loathes Offee a very great deal.

“So what’s all the fuss about?” she drawls, the sibilant s hanging in the air like a snake. 

“Ahsoka wants you to tie up any loose ends and get to rendezvous Horizon,” Offee says. “It’s starting.”

_Took long enough,_ Asajj thinks coldly, but something about Offee’s brusqueness has her on edge. Not even one insult before the ask? Something’s clearly wrong.

“Why now?” She makes herself ask the question; she’ll regret not knowing. 

Offee looks into the distance. “He has taken one of the children.”

Asajj pauses. “Who—”

“She’s safe. It’s the boy. But Wellspring wants him back, of course, and is prepared to wreak havoc to do so.”

“You can’t be serious,” Asajj says incredulously. “All this work, all these years of preparation, and she’s ready to throw it all into the fire because it’s personal, now?”

A half-smile twists Offee’s mouth. “Awfully concerned for someone who, and I quote, ‘doesn’t care about Wellspring or the Alliance’?”

“Kriff care,” Asajj snaps. “I’ve been working for her and her kriffing Alliance for nearly seven years. I won’t see it all wasted because suddenly she’s suffering, too.”

“You sorely misjudge her, if you think there was a time this wasn’t personal,” Offee says coolly. “But the wheels have been in motion for a long time, as you know. This is a final incentive to act, not an impulsive decision. Her proposal was met with unanimous support by the Delegation. Skilled politician as she is, she could not have achieved such support without a truly persuasive plan.”

“That’s all politics is,” says Asajj, “persuasion. But I don’t suppose there’s any use in arguing. How long do I have to wrap up my business here?”

“A pilot will meet you in Freetown in three rotations,” Offee says. “Keep a close eye on him. He’s the best we could do on such short notice.”

“Now that inspires confidence,” Asajj says, desert-dry. “Til Horizon, then.”

“Safe travels,” Offee says, matching her tone, and remounts her speeder. She’s gone in a spur of sand.

Asajj sighs, and begins the walk up to the top of the nearest outcropping, where her speeder and her guide are waiting for her. 

“I can get back on my own,” she offers. “You’ve got family around. If you want to visit them.”

Toora laughs, a harsh, barking sound. “Off-worlder,” she says, “we’re not about to let you die just before you leave.”

“How generous,” Asajj says, and eyes the sniper weapon. “Did you have us in your sights the whole time?”

“Of course,” Toora says. Beneath the wrappings covering her face, like they cover all the Sandpeople, Asajj senses she’s baring her teeth in a vicious smile.

Asajj bares her own teeth back. Anything she says in approval will be taken as condescension; better just to keep that pride to herself. 

“Anyways, the People ’round these parts are twitchy if someone shows up uninvited. Bad blood in the desert. Poisons the People, poisons the trust.”

“Why’s that?”

Toora grunts. “Off-worlder snuck into a camp and slaughtered the entire family. Must be—near fifteen years ago. They still keep up the watches. Shoot on sight.”

“Harsh,” Asajj notes.

“Fair,” Toora counters. “We don’t give off-worlders second chances. You know that.”

Asajj does know that. But she also knows this: Once, the People did give second chances, and they lost their planet for their kindness. 

 

 

Of all the things the Imps could’ve gotten her for—being Dooku’s apprentice, being Force-sensitive, being affiliated with the Separatists—she gets busted for her bounty license being two rotations out-of-date. For the most part, Asajj knows, this is just an excuse not to pay her for the latest offender she’s brought in; it doesn’t have anything to do with who she is, because she’s not stupid enough to have her license in her real name. 

Still, of all the things she could have been arrested for—this is one of the stupidest. She gets dumped into a holding cell, and sent out on the next transport to Wobani.

Really, Asajj thinks, as she gets ready to move a pile of rocks from one side of the yard to the other, she deserves this. She knows better. This is the Force telling her not to be as much as an idiot when she gets out—because she is getting out.

She refuses to consider the alternative. And, for that matter, the Force is with her, coiled possessively in her core. She’s getting out of here, sooner and sooner, and when she does—

She doesn’t know what she’ll do once she gets out. The future yawns wide before her, a chasm of empty possibility. The part of her that still hears Dooku’s voice whispers _vengeance_ ; the part of her that aided Ahsoka Tano in the dying days of the war whispers _help._ The part of her that has survived Dathomir, survived Dooku, survived the Clone Wars and the Emperor’s purges and every kriffing thing the Force has thrown at her screams _survive._

Asajj doesn’t want to die. Vengeance would kill her. Helping makes heroes, and heroes die, too. The fates of the Sith and the Jedi have taught her this. She wants to survive, and this means leaving both branches of Force-use behind, and finding something new.

As for what that is—well. She can figure that out after she’s gotten free of Wobani.

 

 

Since Asajj arrived, and since she took over from Ahsoka, Freetown’s integrated with the Sandpeople. They trade freely, bantha wool and milk and dung, hand-welded scopes and quarter-staffs and rifles for homespun and yarn, dyed different colors, cheeses and yogurts, goods that the Freetowners smuggle in or import from off-system. But Toora still gets some wary looks thrown her way, and she moves through the streets as if ready for an attack. A few years of peace do not erase hundreds of years of strife.

Liana’s waiting for Asajj and Toora back at the headquarters. “I’ve called in the runners,” she says without preamble as soon as they’ve entered. “Meeting’s tonight—wasn’t sure you’d be back this quick.”

“Good,” says Asajj, and sits down against the wall. Headquarters is basic, by Separatist standards. They’ve got a room for their tech in the basement—it gets so hot here, and the equipment they do get is hardly top-of-the-line in the first place. In the meeting room, they’ve covered the floor with rugs, some pillows against the walls, and hung tapestries to brighten the place up a bit—and, of course, to hide their weapons. Out back, they’ve got a barracks for the runners who don’t have a home in town, and temporary housing to help those they free find a path forward.

“So?” Liana’s looking at her expectantly. “How many scandocs do I need to prepare?”

Liana’s a forger. Pretty good, too. She makes IDs for former slaves, and, usually, when Asajj gets called away for a message, it’s about a slaver’s transport or convoy that they can attack. 

“It’s not like that, this time,” Asajj says. “I’ve been recalled to the Rebellion.”

 

 

Wobani is cold grey skies, backbreaking work, senselessness. They aren’t fed well. Sometimes there is real work to be done: digging foundations for a new set of cells, building a new guard post, pouring synthsteel into molds for the endless number of blasters the Empire requires. 

Other times, there is no work, and no rest, either. They move great mounds of stone from one point to another, and back again the next day. They dig a pit, and fill it in. The point is not to accomplish anything: it is to exhaust the detainees until there is no thought for escape or insurrection. Starved, sickly, exhausted, even the most hardened among them falter. Asajj has always been strong, always been lean, but now her bones jut uncomfortably into the cot on which she sleeps. If she lays her hand on her side, she does not have to press through well-developed muscle and a lining of well-earned fat to count her ribs. 

Slowly, and then at once like a bursting dam, those enslaved with her begin to die. And Asajj knows that if she does not escape soon, she will be dead along with them, charred and thrown like refuse into the mass grave that the next set of prisoners will dig.

 

 

Liana has been following her with a close stare ever since she got back. Patience has never been either of their strengths, so it’s only a matter of time before the silence snaps.

Asajj breaks first.

“What?”

“Take me with you,” Liana blurts out. 

Asajj whips around to stare at her. “What?!”

“You heard me,” Liana says staunchly. “Take me with you.”

“I’m not taking you into a war zone,” Asajj says, suddenly, blindingly angry. “And if you were half as clever as I thought you were, you’d thank me for that on bended knee for as long as you live. Stay alive, Hallik. Know how lucky you’ll be to escape war.”

“I could die here,” Liana says, pale—with fear, with anger? “Stray shot, bounty hunter gets lucky—I could die here.”

“You’re safer here,” Asajj snaps. “We need a forger on hand. We need someone the Freetowners won’t balk at in charge. You’re staying, and that’s final.”

“I’ve been in battle,” Liana says fiercely. “I’ve the right to fight against the Empire as much as anyone. Leave me here and just see if I don’t enlist down the ranks, where you can’t look out for me. You’ve seen me fight, you know my forgeries. They’d fall all over themselves to take me on.”

“You’d do that and risk everything we’ve built here?”

“Mae can forge just as well as I,” Liana snaps. “Toora is the best person to lead. You and I know it—and if we want to make meaningful strides towards peace between the People and the off-worlders, appointing her is the absolute least we can do. Take me _with you.”_

Asajj stares at her, and slowly leans back against the work table, where she’d been maintaining her saber. 

“It’s a dangerous thing, asking a Dathomiri witch for a boon,” she says, as softly menacing as she can. “Tell me why you’d risk it, and maybe I’ll think kindly on your request.”

Liana falters at that, but gathers herself with remarkable determination. “I am trying,” she says, “to survive.”

That stabs at Asajj, at the old wounds she’s carried since she first left her homeworld. Survival, that most primal of urges. It was what brought her and Liana together, that recognition of likeness. It is, Asajj decides, what will keep them together.

“Alright,” Asajj says at last. “Call in Mae and Toora. Send a runner to the town hall and the news office. We’ll finish this conversation later.”

 

 

When Asajj sees Ahsoka, the first time since the Empire rose, Ahsoka does the unforgivable: she saves Asajj’s life three times in quick succession. 

Worst of all, Asajj can’t even bring herself to resent her for it. That’s just Ahsoka: impossible, infuriating, inexorable.

 

 

Waeti Vin strolls in shortly after, heavy-lidded and heavily-scarred as ever. He’s followed almost immediately by Tanis Pathfinder, one of the first to escape slavery and bring others with them, and Eera Blackrock, who is their liaison with the local news. 

There is, technically, no reason for Waeti to be here; he has no official position in Freetown government or association with the news other than being a loyal and argumentative subscriber and citizen. But he was Ahsoka’s first contact in Freetown, when she returned to help organize the freedom runners, and he’s procured and donated enough ships that Asajj doesn’t really care if he sticks around. That’s the Dathomiri honor she’s fought so hard to relearn: an eye for an eye, a favor for a favor, especially if the one you owe hasn’t asked for anything else. 

“What’s this about, then?” Tanis demands, as soon as they’re settled comfortably on a stack of cushions.

Direct and to the point: this is what Asajj likes about them.

“Liana and I have been recalled,” Asajj says without preamble. “We’re leaving from here tomorrow.” 

Tanis scrutinizes them. “I see,” they say shortly. “And what of the runners?”

“We’ll address them next,” Asajj says. “We wanted to notify you first, and let you know that Toora Sandfisher and Mae Whitesun will be replacing us.”

“Toora—the…Sandperson,” Tanis says slowly.

“Considering the ways in which she has helped the cause and how well she can expand its scope, especially given her tribal associations, I can think of no one better qualified,” Asajj says, hardening her voice just enough to tell everyone listening that they’ll accept Toora, or else.

“Will she bring more Sandpeople into the cause?”

“Probably,” Asajj says, “and that’s a good thing. You want good relations with the People. Together, you might be able to turn the Hutts out once and for all.”

Waeti Vin barks a laugh. “True enough.”

“Eera? Any questions?” Liana asks.

Eera considers, and glances over her notes. “Can I stay while you address the runners?”

“Fine,” Asajj says. “Any other concerns?”

“I’ll call a town meeting for tonight,” says Tanis decisively. “Please bring Toora and Mae with you.”

“Done,” says Asajj, and the Freetowners, except for Eera, leave.

 

 

Every Dathomiri Nightsister knows the three things necessary to survival: Selfhood; sisterhood; purpose. The last can only be achieved if the first two have already been realized. When Asajj escaped slavery the first time, this was how she rebuilt herself; when she survived Dooku, this was how.

Ahsoka Tano, on Wobani and in its aftermath, restores each one to her, easy as breathing. 

 

 

Liana escorts Eera to wait in an office, and then goes to tell Mae she’s been promoted. Asajj goes to find Toora.

“Off-worlder,” Toora says, once Asajj has made her case, “you’ve lost it. Knew you were too bald to last.”

“You’ve been with us the longest,” Asajj says again, clipped with impatience. “You know the organization, you know the routes. You know things we don’t. You are the best person for the position.”

“I’m not a Jedi or a former slave,” Toora snaps. “I’m of the People. We don’t get the lenience you or the last off-worlder did. When they look at us, they don’t hope. They fear.”

“So teach them to hope alongside the fear,” Asajj says sharply. “And—this would be good for the People. You know it would. Solidify this alliance, take back the planet.”

“With what army?” Toora sneers.

Asajj shrugs. “Eye for an eye, favor for favor,” she says. “Lots of beings will owe you their lives. Beings with useful skills. They might choose to repay you, just so you don’t come collecting down the line.”

“We’d never,” snarls Toora, and Asajj raises her hands in supplication.

“Of course not. But you don’t know what it’s like, getting free. It’s not just chains and implants. It’s in your head, too. People get trapped into slavery by debt, by owing more than they can pay. They won’t want to make the same mistake again, even if their honor doesn’t compel them to help the cause.”

Toora’s quiet for a long time; the Force flickers around her pensively, so Asajj settles in to wait. 

“You really think this could let us restore our world?”

“I think it’s cause for hope,” Asajj says, “which is more than you’ve had for generations. You should take the chance, Toora. Force knows when the next one’ll come along.”

 

 

Asajj’s time on Wobani ends like this: 

An alarm goes off, wailing two yards over; closer, but from the other side, something explodes. Troopers raise their weapons to readiness, but, for once, they’re aiming away from the prisoners.

This is her chance; there will only be one. Asajj wraps her too-thin fingers around a shard of rock she’s sharpened into a dagger, calls on the Force, and attacks.

She’s the first to move, but far from the last. As she launches herself at the nearest trooper, knife aimed for that weakness under the jaw, those surviving with her summon what little strength they have and transform it into violence. That’s all life is, when parsed into its most basic form: the violence of transformation, the transformation of violence. Energy howling the fact of its existence to the universe until entropy swallows it whole. Violence is living; life is violent. In the drawn-out, bloodied minutes of attack, rain misting down and mud betraying unsteady feet, Asajj feels alive like she hasn’t since—since before. Battle. The Wars. Dooku and the Jedi and Ahsoka Tano. Dathomir and the Nightsisters. Before all of that, perhaps to the moment she first opened her mouth to scream into the red sky of her homeworld the fact of her bloodied existence—

A blaster bolt misses her, almost; her ear is on fire. She slaps some mud on it and moves on; she’ll clean it properly once she gets out of here. Trooper plasteel has gone downhill since the Wars, lucky for her—the armor breaks even to her primitive weapon. Bones are harder, but humans are fragile beings, especially without the Force at their fingers. She throws one trooper at another and listens for the crack of bone and marrow to tell her they won’t be getting back up. In close quarters, she finds the soft, tender weaknesses of anatomy all too easy to mortally wound. 

There is no sympathy here, no lenience, no mercy. Asajj has never been inclined to any of those, but to those who made a slave of her again—she will kill them and make a road of their corpses to freedom. 

When all the troopers are dead, she is one of two prisoners left standing. She grabs a blaster, and leaves without a second look. Survival is lean and hungry and viciously cruel; it has cured itself of any softness, any kindness, any generosity. Asajj will survive, so she will be, and do, the same.

 

 

The town meeting goes as well as Liana predicted, which is to say, better than either Asajj or Toora anticipated. 

“Does it get annoying, being right all the time?” Asajj inquires on the walk back.

Liana grins, spinning in the street, face turned up to the stars in the night sky. “No,” she says smugly, “it doesn’t.”

Toora grunts. “I give you a week with the Rebellion before you change your mind.”

“Two days,” Asajj counters, and Toora shrugs.

“Edit your will, off-worlder,” she says. “Don’t think I won’t collect on that. She’s too bright to give up quite that easy. Look at her. Stardust in her veins, star-heart ’round her neck. It’ll be at least a week.”

“I can hear you,” Liana calls, but her voice has lost some of that brightness. 

Asajj raises her eyebrows, and looks to Toora. “Edit your own will, Sandfisher. I’ll be back to collect.”

“You’ll be lucky to survive a year,” Toora says.

“I’m very hard to kill,” Asajj promises. “And I always collect what’s owed.”

 

 

She doesn’t make it far, once the adrenaline of the fight leaches out of her. Her ear is excruciatingly painful; her ribs are bruised, possibly cracked from a hit she took from one of the troopers; there’s blood on her face, and she doesn’t know if it’s her own. The blaster she stole is more use as a crutch than a weapon, so she sidles down one hallway, one path, one fence after another, breath rasping dangerously from her lungs. 

Worst of all, she has no idea where the exit is. The pain distracts, fragmenting her concentration to each site of injury, instead of honing her focus to the Force as Dooku wanted her to learn. 

Not the Dark Side, then, but the Light is equally out of reach. She has none of the Nightsisters’ focusing potions, but enough witch-work memorized to hiss out a way-finding spell. Lot of kriffing good it does her; in the end, she slides down a wall, exhausted and wanting, vaguely, to just close her eyes for a minute—

“There you are,” says a too-familiar voice, and Asajj blinks at blue-white banded lekku, warm orange skin. Of all the jokes for the Force to play—

“I’ve been looking for you,” says Ahsoka Tano, and Asajj decides that this is, finally, too much to handle. 

 

 

Toora pulls out a skin of something foul and fermented back at the base, while Liana begins to pack her bag. Asajj has never unpacked: she’s never been in one place long enough to make the effort, and even if she’s been on Tatooine the last seven years, she’s been running all over the planet for most of that time. She can’t remember the last time she spent a full week here in Freetown.

“Drink up,” Toora says, pouring a full mug of what is probably the stuff they use to strip paint (and any other unwelcome matter) off the hull of a ship.

Eyeing the mug warily, Asajj says, “I thought you weren’t trying to kill me.”

“If this is the stuff that kills you, you deserve it,” Toora informs her bluntly, and unwraps enough to down her own cup in one long swallow.

Asajj considers the situation; Liana solves it for her, by stealing her cup and taking a large sip, which she promptly spits all over the wall. “What in the sweet hells—” she gasps. Toora laughs, a gleeful cackle. 

“Mother’s milk, girlie. Drink up.”

Liana follows orders, and drinks, and wipes her eyes. “Kriff, that’s strong,” she rasps. 

“I don’t know why you expected otherwise,” Asajj says drily, and goes to open the curtain and get some air circulating in the room, resigned to being the only responsible adult in the complex. Perhaps Liana’s just now realized the gravity of her demand to be taken to the Rebellion, out of the relative safety in which Tatooine has sheltered her. Perhaps she’s celebrating getting off this rock. Either way, Asajj doesn’t begrudge her, and it’s not like she would’ve drunk Toora’s brew, anyways.

Liana’s packing gets increasingly haphazard: clothes go from being tightly rolled to being thrown in the vague direction of the bag or the donate pile. She doesn’t have any keepsakes, Asajj notices, just her datapad, a thin album of scandocs to prove her forging skills cleverly hidden in the lining of her vest, and a brutal collapsible baton that Asajj has seen her use with ruthless skill. As the night wears on, and Toora gets Liana increasingly and unrepentantly drunk, Asajj takes it upon herself to organize Liana’s bag and zip it shut.

There’s no knowing when Offee’s pilot will arrive tomorrow, but if Asajj has learned anything in her life, it’s that the Force will always make things as difficult as possible whenever it can. 

“’s nice,” Liana says, mostly asleep at this point; Toora’s claimed the bed, and Asajj has given up trying to get her to move, so she’s half-dragging Liana to the nearest sofa. 

“I am _not,”_ Asajj says immediately. “Take that back.”

Liana makes a gesture that, sober, would be a small wave of dismissal, and is, when drunk, a wild careening move that threatens to send her all the way to the ground. “Not _you,”_ she says emphatically. “No—sayin’ g’bye.”

Asajj lowers her to the sofa, and fetches a bottle of water, some painkillers, and a sealed bin to put next to her, in case Liana needs any of them.

“You are an odd one, Liana Hallik,” she says. Hopefully, Liana is too drunk to remember the note of fondness in her voice.

“I never _got—_ t’say…g’bye before,” Liana says. 

“Then I’m glad you got to say it now,” says Asajj. “Goodnight.”

“Nice!” Liana whispers, in the loud way drunk people do when they think they’re being quiet and sneaky, and Asajj sighs, and lets it go.

 

 

When Asajj comes back to herself, there’s electricity in her veins, literally: Ahsoka is crouching over her with a defibrillator, clear blue eyes focused in concern. 

“Ventress,” she says, “you with me?”

“Hells,” Asajj croaks. “Never thought we’d cross paths again.”

“You of little faith,” Ahsoka says, smiling down at her. “The Force isn’t done with us, yet.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Asajj mutters, but pushes gracelessly to her feet, hand pressed gingerly to her side. “What’s the situation?”

Ahsoka lays it out for her clearly: schematics, numbers, and the plan. This is: Get Asajj out as quickly as possible, and cause as much trouble as they safely can on the way to their extraction point. 

“You came all this way,” Asajj says slowly, “just to get me.”

“Yep,” says Ahsoka cheerfully. “Let’s go.”

There’s something odd about it, something that nags at the back of Asajj’s mind, something she’ll figure out once she has the time and energy to focus. Ahsoka Tano, who survived the Wars and the Purge and the rise of the Empire, risking it all to rescue someone she’d spent most of their relationship trying to kill. An ex-Jedi fighting to save a not-really-Sith. The degree of planning and resources diverted for this one operation, to save one criminal; the way Ahsoka knows without asking or being told how to match Asajj’s pace, when to catch her shoulder to keep her from falling and when to back off before Asajj turns on her with a snarl. 

How she’d had a defibrillator on hand when she couldn’t have known she’d need it. 

_Keep count of your debts, precious girl,_ Mother Talzin had hissed in her ear, that long-past night when Asajj was martyred into slavery. _That is the only road to freedom._

Asajj pays her debts, and she counts two so far: the assault on the labor camp, the resurrection of her heart. A third is unthinkable. Her freedom was bartered to Hal’Sted on behalf of the sisters; she gave it up to the Jedi, not understanding what it was; she sacrificed it to Dooku, the price for power; she lost it to the Empire. Ahsoka will not be another master. Asajj will not allow it.

 

 

Asajj throws the packed bag at the Liana-shaped pile of blankets curled in the ’fresher. “Time to get up.”

“No,” says the pile of blankets, in a wheezing whisper.

“Your own fault for thinking you could keep up with Toora’s tolerance,” Asajj says mercilessly. “Clean up quick. Ship’s been spotted entering atmosphere.”

“I regret everything,” the pile mutters, and Asajj sighs. She turns off the light, and kneels by the pile, where she thinks Liana’s head is.

“You’re eighteen, Liana,” she says. “Adulthood is ninety percent regretting past decisions. You get used to it.”

Liana tugs back a corner of blanket; one green eye blinks up at Asajj suspiciously. “What’s the other ten percent?”

Asajj shrugs. “In my experience? About one percent learning from your mistakes, and nine percent repeating them.”

“That’s so depressing,” Liana says. “Why do I hang out with you?”

“I ask myself that every day,” Asajj says, and leaves.

 

 

The path to the extraction point is by no means clear, despite Ahsoka’s impeccable preparation. She has, somehow, a sense that goes beyond Asajj’s own familiarity with Ahsoka’s Force-signature, like a new dimension: she sees obstacles coming and pulls Asajj into an office or down a side-corridor, each as miraculously empty as the last, right until one isn’t. 

To a casual observer, someone who hadn’t spent most of their adult life engaged in close combat against Ahsoka Tano, who hadn’t spent the last half-hour trying to piece together exactly what had changed since those battles and why it had, perhaps it would seem like chance. Luck gone bad, like it always goes. 

But Asajj, in a rare moment of hindsight meeting foresight, sees it come together, as smoothly as a dancer’s choreography: sees Ahsoka turn to face a trooper, sees an officer raise his weapon to fire; sees Ahsoka tense in recognition of the threat and, inexplicably, remain still; sees herself lunge between the blaster and her enemy, and feels her ribs catch flame.

 

 

“Next time,” Liana says, hood pulled down over her eyes to guard against the suns, “cut me off.”

“I’m not your keeper,” says Asajj. “Cut yourself off.”

“Better yet,” Liana continues, as if Asajj hadn’t spoken, “just put me out of my misery preemptively and kill me in my sleep.”

“Keep complaining, and I will.”

They’re waiting in the scant shade of Waeti Vin’s shipyard as a small freighter lands. Hydraulics hiss; the boarding ramp extends down to the sand. From within the ship, footsteps echo, and the air stills in anticipation.

“Eyes sharp, wits quick,” Asajj mutters to Liana.

“Should’ve thought of that last night,” Liana mutters back.

A helmeted, goggled figure strolls down the boarding ramp as if it were a red carpet, arms extended as if in benediction. 

“Lady Ventress!” exclaims Hondo Ohnaka, with every appearance of sincere delight. “Just the woman I’m here to see.”

Really, Asajj thinks sourly, Offee could’ve given her more warning.

 

 

Asajj wakes once, in the aftermath. Ahsoka is sleeping by her medicapsule, and the world is soft and blurred at the periphery, like someone’s smudged her vision. She is so comfortable that she knows she must be in excruciating pain, and under an unwise amount of painkillers, and will soon drift into unconsciousness like a boat on the water. 

Take chances where you find them: a lesson learned from experience, and not any master. 

She can move her arm, so Asajj takes her chance. She hits Ahsoka as hard as she can in the thigh (the only part she can reach), and waits for eye contact before hissing, “You absolute _bitch.”_

 

 

Liana hefts her bag and makes for the ramp, but Asajj grabs her just in time. “Wait,” she snarls, and pulls out her emergency comm and sets it to the emergency frequency.

It’s Offee, not Ahsoka, who answers, which is just the cherry on top of this farce.

“Hondo Ohnaka,” Asajj says flatly. “Are you serious?”

“As death,” Offee replies, breezy as a Mirialian winter wind.

“If I were there, I’d punch you,” Asajj snaps.

Offee straightens slightly. Her eyes narrow. “You’d _try.”_

That doesn’t deserve a response. She ends the comm. 

“Nice friends you got,” Liana says drily.

“Shut up and get on,” Asajj says harshly. “And as for you—” She points at Hondo— “try _anything_ and I will throw you out the airlock myself.”

“Oh, is that any way to treat an old friend?” Hondo pouts.

“It’s the only way to treat a smuggler like you,” Asajj snaps. “Liana—help me search every centimeter of this ship. Anything that’s not supposed to be here is a donation to the runners.”

Liana tosses her a sardonic salute, but gets to work. They spend three hours scouring the ship’s every nook and cranny, peeling back a rug or a fake wall or an actually useless panel of controls that contains several liters of Alderaanian mountain whiskey—which Asajj commandeers for herself, as a reward for getting through this bantha shit. The weapons, Asajj permits; the blocks of spice, she gives to Toora to dispose of; luxuries are sent to the temporary housing (perfumes, synthsilk, chocolate); a crate of puffer pigs are put immediately in the custody of the city council. Throughout the entire ordeal, Hondo Ohnaka makes himself exactly as insufferable as he’s always been. He wails at the injustice, bemoans Asajj’s cruelty, sneaks contraband back on board almost as quickly as she and Liana find it, and confides to Waeti Vin that he’s so proud of how Asajj has grown, and developed her pirate’s instincts, and even—here, he lifts his goggles to wipe away a tear as fake as the jewels Liana just found in the ’fresher’s drain—made a _friend_. 

Like _that’s_ new.

 

 

There’s history with Hondo Ohnaka, is the thing, a history which betrays her buried prejudices and scarring wounds: her first master was murdered by Weequay pirates when she was still a child; her third was made a fool by Ohnaka himself. One memory still claws at her skin in an uncomfortable mix of relief and terror; the other cuts her with the twin blades of nostalgia and insult. 

And then there’s all the times Asajj and Ohnaka have been thrown together since the rise of the Empire. Incomprehensibly, Ahsoka had recruited him as an occasional ally, or at least not-enemy, and chartered his services as a smuggler when she first came to Tatooine. He was the one who brought Asajj into the Twin Suns’ orbit, he was the one who took her out of it to make introductions to the Nightsisters; he was Asajj’s first getaway driver when she was a runner, and now, apparently, her guide away from the life she’s built here. 

Another circle, swollen to a close, like a fruit gone slack with rot.

 

 

In hyperspace, Liana goes to bed early, the remnants of her hangover returning with a vengeance now that she’s unoccupied. Ohnaka lazes in the cockpit, all louche and careless, feet propped on the controls and arms cradling his spiny head. “You are so cruel to me, Asajj,” he scolds, though his tone is fond, not angry. 

“Cruel would be the Imps if you got busted for smuggling half that contraband,” Asajj retorts, but sets one of the bottles of Alderaanian whiskey down between them as a peace offering. 

“Cruel would be the Imps if I got busted smuggling _you,”_ Ohnaka corrects. He hefts the bottle contemplatively. “I was saving this for a special occasion.”

“What do you call this?” Asajj demands. 

“Well,” Hondo says, smiling, “that depends. What do you have for me?”

“Well,” Asajj says, echoing him and drawing out the word. “You understand how little time I had to wrap things up in Freetown, how I didn’t know it was you coming to get me—”

“Lady Ventress,” Hondo gasps, “did you come aboard my ship without even a _token_ of your affection?”

“On the contrary,” Asajj says. “I emptied the coffers.”

“Yes,” snaps Hondo, “I was _there_ —”

“—and then I filled them right back up,” Asajj says, ignoring the interruption. “Congratulations, Hondo. While you were wailing about how we were taking advantage of your generosity and magnanimity, I made you very, very rich.”

Hondo stares at her for a long moment, and then leaps from his chair in a flash. She hears rummaging, doors opening and panels being wrenched open, and a shriek of ecstasy—which prompts Liana to shout _“SHUT UP!!!”_ at them—and then Hondo is back, breathless and manic with glee. 

“Lady Ventress,” he says, “most beautiful and most bald—most cunning and most sly—you have made me the happiest pirate in the galaxy! No! In the universe!”

From the cabins comes a muffled thump, as if someone has thrown a pillow at the door. “If you’re getting married,” Liana shouts, “do it _quietly!”_

“Where did you find such a trove?” Hondo whispers, courteous as ever.

“We found one of Jabba’s caches.” There’s more, is what she’s implying, and the way Hondo’s eyes glitter tells her he reads the subtext loud and clear.

“It’s mine?”

“You haven’t heard the ask, yet,” Asajj points out. “Sure you want to accept the gift without knowing the terms?”

“Name it,” Hondo says.

“Your loyalty,” she says. “Over Ahsoka. Over Offee. Over profit. Take whatever jobs you want, Hondo. Do with the rewards and the risks what you will. But when the Rebellion comes calling, remember that you’re in _my_ corner. Not theirs. Not hers.”

“I like Lady Tano,” Hondo says musingly. 

“You like profit more.”

“And you’ll keep me paid?”

“If you’ll provide passage when and how I need it.”

“Done,” Hondo says, and that’s that.

 

 

Asajj has never learned what kept Hondo Ohnaka more or less loyal to Ahsoka Tano. Her first thought, that Ahsoka has exploited his culture the way she has Asajj’s—a life thrice saved is a lifetime owed, a debt so crushing it can never be paid—was cast aside when her surreptitious research into Florrum and Weequay cultures and customs turned up nothing. 

Hondo’s main drive has always been greed; Asajj determines that, for whatever reason, he has concluded that loyalty to Ahsoka is more profitable than playing the Rebellion against the Empire. Loyalty, then, goes to the highest bidder. And Asajj has just ensured that the bidder in question is her.

 

 

Time turns on relentlessly after Wobani. Ahsoka and Offee, who has been so careless as to lose Asajj’s lightsabers, take her to Dagobah, to Javin, Bespin and Corellia. The remaining Jedi judge her disapprovingly, which is exactly as much fun as she remembers it being. She goes with them on a few reconnaissance missions, getaway pilot and backup and courier when things go south. Finally, they take her to Tatooine.

“I think you could do good here,” Ahsoka says, still tentative. There had been a fight, as vicious as between two hounds cornered by hunger and circumstance, once Asajj had recovered enough for it, for the entrapment into another kind of slavery, for the unasked for rescue, for the moment of deliberate hesitation that had cost them both so much.

(In the end, she can’t even blame Ahsoka for it: she’d noticed the difference in Ahsoka’s Force-signature, and it tallied with the other oddities of the escape. When Ahsoka says, stricken, “I didn’t know _why—_ I’m sorry—I _trusted_ it—” Asajj wants to scream at her, curse that naïveté to the abyss— _never_ trust the Force; it has only its own interests at heart—but she also, damningly, understands. She moves on, even if she does not forgive.)

She goes to Tatooine. She dons the homespun, however much it chafes, and makes nice with the locals, which chafes worse. Toora, the People’s liaison, is the only one she can really call friend. 

The work, with the runners, the Freetowners, the newly free, is cathartic and exhausting and enough. It can be enough. She settles into it more with every planetary rotation, allows the suns to burn into her bones and the sand to wear her skin into callouses. 

And, as always, the desert offers something in return, which is how Asajj finds herself walking from town with only a gut instinct and a flask of water at her hip to sustain her, and returning three days later with heatstroke, dehydration, and two shining kyber crystals in her hands. 

 

 

Asajj is reviewing Rebellion codes, coordinates, and hierarchy the next morning when Liana knocks at her door. 

“Hey,” Liana says, uncharacteristically subdued. “Can I come in?”

“It depends on your purpose,” Asajj says.

“I need to tell you something.”

Asajj sets down her data pad. “It’s too late to turn the ship around.”

“I know that,” Liana snaps. “Stars—we have a conversation to finish.”

Right. Asajj holds up a hand, and reaches into her bag for her jammer to block any surveilling signals. There’s a limit to her trust in Hondo, and this is it. 

“Go on,” she says, and settles back to wait.

 

 

Mos Eisley is the usual meeting place for Ahsoka’s couriers, if she has updates on the Rebellion or intelligence on slavers’ itineraries to pass on. It’s where Asajj goes, too, to meet her own informants stationed in Jabba’s palace, and the agents she’s cultivated in the slave quarters. She makes it there, under Toora’s guidance, about once a month, though Toora stays outside city limits. Sometimes Mae Whitesun, sent their way by a moisture farmer named Beru, accompanies her. Most often, Asajj goes alone. 

Whitesun is a freed-name: Mae’s grandparents were enslaved. There is still a bounty on her grandmother’s head for a riot she incited, during which she escaped. Asajj knows bounty hunters sometimes take children to pay for their parents’ slights. She doesn’t ask Mae to return often. Sometimes the risk is necessary; this is not one of those times.

This is the time Asajj meets Liana, and this is how: a hand slipping not-quite-slyly-enough into Asajj’s pack, and Asajj catching the would-be thief about the wrist, tight enough to grind her bones against each other.

Asajj isn’t in the habit of taking out her ire on passerby. She is in the habit of taking it out on those who make her life more difficult. Caught in her grip, the pickpocket glares at her defiantly, and just as Asajj is trying to decide whether or not to make a scene, the girl snaps out a baton and hits Asajj just behind the knee with jarring force. Startled, Asajj releases her and drops down, and the girl takes off in a sprint.

Fine. A scene it is.

The girl is good; Asajj admits that without rancor. It’s a good chase, interspersed with bouts of close combat, exhilarating as skirting the edge of a sandstorm and nearly as dangerous, considering how many bounty hunters and agents of Jabba’s are sure to be in the city. But the girl seems to want to avoid them as much as much as Asajj does, and so runs from the center to the outskirts. 

Far enough that there’s no one to bear witness, Asajj draws and lights her saber. It burns a deep, orchid violet before her, and the girl catches herself at the sound, and stares. Her hand flies to her neck; the Force sings in eerie harmony. A shot shatters the air, and Toora appears on top of a dune, shaking sand from her robes like a cloak.

Caught between the saber and the rifle, the girl drops her baton to the sand, jaw tensing in self-flagellating fury. “I didn’t know,” she bites out. “I wouldn’t’ve—you’re _Jedi—_ I wouldn’t’ve.”

Close enough now, Toora shoves her forward; the girl stumbles, a snarl caught in her teeth. A packet drops to the desert sand.

The secret’s out anyway. Asajj raises her hand, and the Force with it, and the packet flies to meet her. It’s full of scandocs, for a dozen different beings. At least four match the girl’s face and biometrics. Forgeries then, and very good ones. But they could be better.

Asajj folds the packet back together, and nods sharply at Toora to stand down. She tosses the packet to her to inspect.

“So which name’s your real one?” Asajj inquires. Toora flips through the docs inscrutably. 

“None of them,” says the girl. Core accent, more like Kenobi’s than Dooku’s; she must have lived at least some time on Coruscant, and in the upper crust, too. How’d a girl like that end up picking pockets on Tatooine?

“You’re Coruscanti,” Asajj says. “Or were. The accent’s pretty sharp. Started off comfortable enough. But something went bad, didn’t it? Comfortable Coruscanti girls don’t learn to use a baton like that, they don’t make forgeries this good, and they don’t wind up out here, hiding in the desolation of the Outer Rim. So what’s your story?”

“None of your business,” the girl says resentfully, eyes flashing.

“And you know of the Jedi,” Asajj muses. Not that she is one, but the girl doesn’t need to know that. “More than that—you respect the old religion. I can hear it singing around your neck. It’s not quite yours, that respect, is it? You carry it for another out of obligation—no. Memory. A parent?” The girl flinches. “A parent,” Asajj confirms. “Mother. Your mother is dead and all she left you was her spirit and her faith. What would she think of what you’ve become?”

“You don’t know what in Sith hells you’re talking about,” the girl snarls, feral as a cornered womp-rat. Her fingers twitch towards the baton; Asajj reaches for it in the Force and knocks it just out of reach on the sand.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Asajj says softly. “Precious girl—it doesn’t have to be.”

The girl glares at her. “What does that mean?”

Asajj grins, baring teeth. “How’d you like a job?” 

 

 

“You never asked, so I never said,” says Liana, “but I think I owe you this truth. As offering to a Dathomiri witch, who never give anything for free.”

“For my protection,” Asajj says softly. “Why do you need protection from the Rebellion, Liana?”

Liana swallows, and looks down. Her dark hair falls over her grey-green eyes, the sunburnt stretch skin around her brow.

“Not just the Rebellion, I’m afraid,” she says, trying for light and falling transparently short. “The Empire. Like as not the Partisans under Saw Guerrera, too.”

“What a lot you ask,” Asajj murmurs; she wants to pry open the girl’s skull and find the root of the riddle. “Tell me.”

Liana swallows, and looks back up, meeting Asajj’s gaze with fear and courage. “My father, if he’s survived, is enslaved to the Empire as a builder of weapons,” she says. “My real name, the one my parents gave me, is Jyn Erso.”

 

 

Asajj feels Horizon before Hondo gets on the intercom to inform them that they’ll land in half an hour. It’s a press of consciousness, rife with fear, excitement, nerves, purpose, righteousness, exactly what she would expect from the Rebellion. A few beings shine bright in the Force, from familiarity and the burn of midichlorians in their veins. Kenobi, who reacts with a pulse of terse acknowledgement when he senses her; Windu and Unduli and Ti, of the surviving Jedi; Offee, whose sense of briskness sours when Asajj sends a nudge of greeting; and Ahsoka, a light in the darkness too bright to look at, even now, even here.

No sign of the girl. Has Wellspring not yet arrived? Sloppy for the movement’s organizer, but perhaps prudent for its most wanted member. 

But Kenobi is here. No matter. She’ll find out soon enough.

Jyn is waiting near the airlock as they descend, by the time Asajj gets there. Her hands in their fingerless gloves strum restlessly against the strap of her pack. 

“Do me proud, Hallik,” Asajj says lowly. Jyn—Liana still, to everyone else, buried like every other secret beneath her ribs—straightens and stills, and if her fingertips are white around the strap of her bag, it’s better than the fidgeting.

The ship settles on the landing platform with a rocking thud of hydraulics; seconds later, Hondo appears and keys open the airlock to unfold the boarding ramp. “Good luck, ladies!” he sings out cheerfully, and bounds ahead of them to bully some unfortunate maintenance worker into refueling the ship (and, more like than not, attempt to scam the Rebellion out of fuel and parts).

Asajj rolls her eyes, and starts down the ramp, Jyn stuck close as a shadow. At the bottom, arms elegantly folded and lekku swaying gently as she turns her head from Hondo to Asajj, Ahsoka waits.

Asajj steps from the awning of the ship and sketches a sarcastic bow. “Lady Tano.”

Ahsoka smiles, warm as the first rays of Tatoo 1 breaking over the horizon in those precious moments before Tatoo 2 follows and bakes the planet to dust. She bows back. “Lady Ventress,” she says, gently teasing. “And Liana.”

“Sir,” says Jyn stiffly, and ducks her head.

Asajj catches Ahsoka’s eye, still twilit-blue as the first time they’d met. “She threatened to enlist on her own if I didn’t take her with me,” she says with a shrug. “This way we can keep an eye on her.”

“Well, then, Liana,” Ahsoka says, and Jyn ducks her head again, as if avoiding a ray of light. “Welcome to the Rebellion.”

“You’re not supposed to call it that,” says another voice, but disinterestedly, a token protest. Ahsoka turns. 

“I know,” she says gently to the girl standing in her shadow. “But it’s a bit more exciting that way.”

Had she even noticed the girl before speaking, Asajj would not have recognized her. She is too thin for her age, and wan, the blue of her dress only serving to highlight the circles under her eyes, and the painted teardrops under the circles. She is so unlike the inquisitive, clever, round-faced girl Asajj had met so briefly on Dathomir as to be entirely distinct. Silence yawns around her, void and terrible, where the Force should sing. 

“Liana Hallik, this is Leia Naberrie,” Ahsoka says, attentive as ever, and, “Leia, you remember Asajj Ventress?”

Leia looks at Asajj expressionlessly, a marked difference from the avid curiosity with which she’d questioned Asajj the last time they’d met. It sits wrongly on her, the indifference, the apathy, and Asajj bows to Leia more sincerely, hoping to elicit even a small acknowledgement. But Leia’s face does not change, and after a second she turns to Ahsoka.

“Socks,” she says, and Ahsoka nods as though this makes perfect sense. 

“Barriss is coming,” Ahsoka tells them, crouching to lift Leia into her arms. “She’ll see you settled. There’s a briefing in an hour; I’ll see you there.”

“Great,” says Asajj flatly, and, as always, watches Ahsoka walk away, and does nothing to stop her.

In the distance, Leia’s head swivels to stare back. Asajj breaks first, and drops her eyes.

 

 

True to Ahsoka’s word, Offee arrives a scarce minute later, her typical skirt exchanged for loose pants that gather snugly into boots. “You’re to share quarters,” she says curtly, without so much as a word in greeting. “We’re cramped for space even without advance notice that you’re bringing a second. Mess is through there; we’ll want you on the simulator later, Ventress, to qualify you for a ship.”

“I am not cannon fodder,” Asajj says coldly, and Offee stops and turns, eyes like ice on Ilum.

“Let us be perfectly clear,” Offee says very softly, each word bitten out with clean precision. “You are whatever Ahsoka Tano says you are. Right now, that’s whatever the Rebellion says you are. If the Rebellion declares you to be cannon fodder, then that is what you will be, and you will be cannon fodder with utmost skill and professionalism. Do we understand one another?”

Hate scorches its way up Asajj’s throat; the Dark Side gathers at her fingertips. “I am too damned useful to be made target practice for TIE fighters,” she snarls. “I know you’re afraid of me, but don’t let that make you more of an idiot than you already are.”

_“Afraid—!?”_

She’s been waiting for Offee to take the bait, which is the only reason she has her own lightsaber out and up in time to block Offee’s blade as it goes for her neck. From the corner of her eye, she sees Jyn leap back, and movement pause. A dozen beings turn their attention to them, to the shriek of lightsabers clashing, and Asajj bears her teeth in a feral grin. Game on.

Asajj shoves forward with all of her considerable strength, managing to push Offee back and disengage their blades for a half-second before Offee relaunches her attack, lunging forward with her blade sweeping in a broad emerald arc. Asajj blocks and ripostes, parries Offee’s redouble and counters from the low line, aiming to hamper that quicksilver mobility enough to even the odds. Already, her lungs ache with exertion, the reminder of every wound and every weakness she’s ever been made to wear. 

Offee parries low, sweeps her saber high with a flourish, her blade singeing Asajj’s Tatooine homespun before Asajj manages to force her back; distantly, she registers Jyn shouting at her, voice high and thin with anxiety. Enough time on defense. Asajj is hungry for blood. 

There is no way to dispute the fact that Offee is a brilliant duelist. There is no disputing the fact that Asajj lacks a practice partner, and a droid can only do so much. Luck and circumstance have always ended Asajj’s battles against Jedi like Offee, like Ahsoka; luck and circumstance are what ends this one, too.

_**“STOP.”** _

The shout rings out in the hangar in the same instant that someone draws upon the Force with greater strength than Asajj has ever encountered, sending both her and Offee flying to opposite ends of their dueling circle. Wincing at the bruise she’s sure to have all on her back, Asajj looks up, and lets sourness curdle in her stomach at the sight. 

Ahsoka is there, but in the background, face unreadable. The order, and the Force, came from the two figures in the foreground: the Wellspring, Padmé Amidala, and her daughter, Leia Naberrie.

Amidala is—there is no other word for it—incandescent with rage. Leia wears a very faint frown.

“How dare you,” Amidala says, her voice like steel in the air. “How _dare_ you put on such a childish display here. We are at _war,_ in case that had escaped your notice. We are at war and the Galaxy suffers and you waste your energies fighting each other instead of for the freedom of us all? I thought better of you.”

“Senator,” says Offee quietly, but Amidala turns on her, flashing in fury.

“My daughter of ten years has more self control than two Jedi thrice her age,” Amidala snaps. “I had more responsibility at fourteen than either of you have ever borne, and never did I shame myself like this. This is outrageous. You will apologize to the fleet and the maintenance crews, and you will repair anything that needs repairing here, whether you broke it or not.”

“Senator!” Asajj objects.

“We leave things better than we find them,” Amidala says coldly. “Is that not so, Lady Ventress?”

It is so; it is the backbone of all the work she’s done the last seven years on Tatooine. Grudgingly, Asajj concedes the point.

“Report to your commanders when you are finished,” Amidala says. “Dismissed.”

With that, she takes Leia’s hand, and walks away.

Ahsoka doesn’t. She goes to Offee quickly, helping her stand and speaking to her quietly for a minute. Offee looks down, and nods, and accepts the kiss Ahsoka offers tenderly.

Jyn, after a moment, comes over. “You hurt?”

“No,” Asajj says tersely.

“Good,” says Jyn. “You’re a kriffing idiot. We made a deal, remember?”

“And for a minute I thought you cared.”

“Liana.” Ahsoka is standing just beyond them, a greying trooper at her side. “Rex will take you to the briefing. I need to speak to Asajj.”

Jyn goes. Ahsoka crouches in her place. “You’re not hurt?”

“Take more than her to hurt me.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Ahsoka says softly. 

Asajj swallows thickly. “Should’ve left me to rot on Tatooine.”

“Is that what you want?”

She wants a lot of things. None of them are possible. She keeps her silence.

Ahsoka is quiet for a minute. “Please don’t antagonize Barriss,” she says.

“Not my fault she attacked me,” Asajj snaps.

“She shouldn’t have done that,” Ahsoka agrees. “You shouldn’t have baited her.”

“She shouldn’t’ve made it so easy.”

“Asajj—” Ahsoka says, and squeezes her eyes closed. When she speaks again, it is with utmost care. “We are likely going to be working closely together, the three of us. We need to be able to function as a unit. We cannot have this—this infighting.”

“So order me,” says Asajj, breath gone tight in her lungs. “Give me the kriffing order. I’m yours to command.”

“You’re your own person,” Ahsoka says sharply. “Not—not mine. Never mine.”

Daringly, Asajj reaches, and takes Ahsoka’s hand in her own. “Always,” she says.

Ahsoka stares at their hands for a second, and draws back, rising gracefully. “Barriss is my partner,” she says evenly. “Respect my choice if you will not respect her.”

Asajj says nothing, and, again, watches Ahsoka leave, and does nothing to stop her.

 

 

Things often go badly. That’s the way the galaxy turns. No stopping it. They always go bad. The two are not mutually inclusive or exclusive. They just are.

This time, with Ahsoka walking away, command reverberating in the air like a thunderclap, they’ve gone bad, badly. 

Even for Asajj, it’s impressive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PHEW. so almost 10k later! we’ve got Asajj in the picture, we’re setting up for Real Action (sweats nervously) & as you can see, Ahsoka & Barriss have reconciled. Momidala is super scary w/ “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed” bc it’s super obvious that she’s BOTH
> 
> Thank you to all you wonderful folks who left me comments on the last chapter! I’m heading over to flail back at you rn. You guys make my day with every scream and keyboard smash and thoughtful response. 
> 
> +kudos to jo for breaking hiatus!!! that’s amazing!!!
> 
> (next up: The Briefing)


	3. three: leia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The galaxy feels small, now, halved and constrained and empty. Space has always been empty, Leia knows; it’s just that without Luke, it feels empty for the first time.

“There we are,” Mama says softly. “All done.”

Leia opens her eyes, and turns to the mirror. Her reflection stares back, somber and pale in the lights, the two woad-blue tears stark on her cheekbones. She cannot remember quite what she looks like without them; her face seems alien to her in the mornings just after waking, and in the evenings after her thrice-weekly bath. But she likes the tears, as much as she likes anything now. Through them, she wears her sorrow on her body, and doesn’t have to carry the burden of it inside. 

“We Naboo make ourselves,” Mama had said once, “in word and deed. The application of cosmetics is both. It is an act and a signification. Its meaning is interpreted by others, but authored by us.”

Now, Mama spins Leia’s chair back around, smiling, a little impish, a little bruised with her own burden. “Now me, my dragon.”

Leia picks up the brush she and Mama had bound together, and dips it carefully into the pot of woad they had mixed together. Her hands, young as they are, are perfectly steady as she paints one tear and the other on Mama’s cheeks.

 

 

Beings stare on Horizon Base. Mom had warned her of this—what it means to be different, to stand out in a crowd. Mom had learned this testifying to the Senate during the invasion of Naboo, what it meant to have her youth counted against her, to be seen as young and naïve, without the brilliance or capability she knew herself to possess. Mama is more circumspect.

“They will fear for you, because you are so young,” she says before their arrival. “Younglings are our future. You are our hope. They will not want to see you hurt.”

Ahsoka had offered another perspective, too. “They will fear for you, certainly,” she’d said slowly. “But you must be careful. The most visible Force-user in the galaxy is Darth Vader. If they learn of your connection—or if they learn the extent of your power—they will fear you, too.”

“I don’t want them to fear me,” Leia had said immediately, surprised at herself for the strength of that reaction. Fear could be useful, another part of her had whispered, but she had banished it it of hand. Fear was the weapon of the enemy. She would not stoop to that level. 

Mama strokes her hair and kisses her brow when Leia confesses this exchange. “Dragon,” she says—she’s taken to calling Leia that since Luke—since Luke. “Look no further than your mother if you want to learn to lead through example and love, not anger and fear. She is the best teacher you could hope for.”

“You’re just saying that ’cause you love her,” Leia accuses, and Mama smiles like a bird taking flight.

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

 

 

Beings stare, is the point. Leia loses track, sometimes, without Luke spun into her self. It’s still instinct to seek him out, to offer her thoughts and feelings up to him as he does—as he did for her. When he doesn’t answer, doesn’t even receive, the little parcels of her just drift away aimlessly; Leia can’t quite summon the energy to bring them back into herself. 

That’s another reason why they stare, she thinks. They can see that she’s not all there, that she’s emptying out, less herself with each passing rotation. The flatness of her affect worries Mama and Ahsoka most, because they’re the ones who notice it most. Obi-Wan and Mom are busy, too busy, barely sleeping sometimes, but Leia can’t blame them, doesn’t want to. They’re trying to bring Luke back. That’s all she wants, too.

Socks takes her, when Mama is called away; Cody sits quietly with her and watches old _Dex’s Diner_ episodes when Ahsoka has matters to attend to. When even Cody is called away, Artoo and Threepio keep her company, or rather, Artoo does: Threepio is with Mom more often than not, translating and fussing and recording what Mom trusts him to record. 

At least her Binary’s getting pretty good. Artoo hardly ever corrects her now, and steals junk metal from the engineers for her to work with, while he gossips and makes really bad jokes and points out when she might accidentally start a fire instead of bypass a lock. 

 

 

The galaxy feels small, now, halved and constrained and empty. Space has always been empty, Leia knows; it’s just that without Luke, it feels empty for the first time.

 

 

After the confrontation between B and Ventress, Mom leads Leia to the command center. Mama is already there, having busied herself with readying the space for their arrival: setting out tea, Mom’s datapads and flimsiplast, the holo projector, logging into Horizon’s data network, and carefully securing a corner for Leia to sit, hidden behind Artoo’s bulk. 

“Thank you, Sabé,” Mom says quietly, pressing a kiss to the back of Mama’s hand. Her lipstick leaves a warm blush of love on Mama’s pale skin. 

“Senator Mothma arrived moments ago,” Mama murmurs. “Senators Organa, Chuchi, Meddon, Jamillia, and Iblis have hailed flight control and will land shortly. General Dodonna and the Dac delegation are on site and en route. The Nightsisters have indicated that Lady Ventress will act as their liaison; the Bothans have sent a representative, and the Mandalorians have sent an entire contingent. Commander Sato has brought a number of independent cells anxious to garner Alliance support for their own missions. And the Fulcrum program is in attendance.”

A pale, thin-nosed man appears as if from nowhere. “That is impressive,” he says. “You would make an excellent spy.”

Mama raises a brow. “I already have.” 

“General Draven,” Mom intercedes, “my partner, Sabé Naberrie.”

“A pleasure,” Draven says. “How did you glean all that? You arrived only hours ago.”

“The same way any competent operative does,” says Mama. “Informants and observation.”

Obi-Wan and Ahsoka have been here longer than the _Spark_ , and Leia saw the _Pikobi_ a few landing platforms down from their own. She knows Mom and Mama speak personally with a lot of the senators, and have themselves conducted diplomatic outreach to a lot of the systems mentioned; Leia’s been with them when they do. It’s not that complicated to figure out how Mama knows everything; it’s much harder to determine how she keeps it all organized. 

“No word from Ryloth or Jedha?” Mom asks.

“We’ve word,” Draven says. “Ryloth sends its greetings, and begs to be remembered in the proceedings; Cham Syndulla’s daughter is here, as captain of a Rebel cell. Saw Guerrera is attending via holo. Envoys from Rodia and Toydaria are present as well.”

“The Delegation of 2000 and the Separatists are well represented,” Mom notes, and Leia understands this, too: Mom disagreed with the war to force the Confederacy of Independent Systems to remain in the Republic, because Mom has known as long as she’s known herself that war wreaks only grief. Leia has listened in on many council meetings, the family and their allies, their witnesses, piecing together a history that is more smoke than fact: she knows, as does the family, that the Emperor is the one who waged that war, and the one who won it. 

Her stomach swoops in hollow discomfort; she twitches, and hugs herself tightly, gripped in the certainty that if she does not, she will fly apart, even as she recognizes the absurdity of the thinking. Luke—Luke should be here, Luke gives the best hugs, Luke, bright and warm as sunshine, effulgent with love, should not be lost in the terrible shadow of the Emperor’s hand. Dome rotating, Artoo whistles at her in concern—her posture alarms him—and then again in greeting, as a familiar, beloved figure steps into Leia’s awareness, luminous as a moon in the Force.

Ahsoka kneels next to her, blue eyes intent on hers. “Names are important, Leia,” she says. “Just as we are meant to call ourselves the Alliance and not the Rebellion. What are we meant to call him?”

Leia swallows, and rasps out the answer. “Chancellor Palpatine.”

“Calling him the Emperor erases his corruption, makes him more than a single man,” Ahsoka agrees. “Calling the Alliance the Rebellion suggests that the Empire’s sovereignty is legitimate.”

“And—?” She can’t bring herself to speak his name, his title. Ahsoka understands anyway.

She’s silent a moment, considering, which is one of the things Leia loves best about her: Socks always tells her the truth, as best she can, is always unimpeachably fair in her evaluation. Not a word is spoken that is not intended. Obi-Wan is like that, and Luke, a little, but Leia has too much of her mothers in her, too much of him: when provoked, she spits and twists like a feral cat, reacting with instinct instead of with care. She wants to be more like Socks in this, more careful. Her voice is as powerful a tool as the Force, Mama has told her, and Luke: it deserves the same effort.

The Force doesn’t require much effort for them, but Mama doesn’t quite understand that.

At last, Ahsoka speaks. “You must name him with purpose. Your purpose. Name him so that he does not weaken you, Leia. You will need your strengths to do that.”

 

 

She feels—stupid, and weak, and disgust for herself—she feels weak. Without Luke. It’s so hard without him. She had never thought she’d have to be without him—had never thought she’d feel so alone, even when surrounded by her family, whom she loves and who love her. Before Cyphar, Leia had never known a second of life when she was not perfectly, wholly understood, and accepted, and loved; when she did not perfectly and wholly understand, and accept, and love in return. Amputation would be easier than this. Blindness or deafness or muteness would be easier than this. 

She wonders how Mom had managed, if she had loved—him—so much, but Mom had Mama, has Mama, who understands and accepts and loves her more than he ever did.

No one knows Leia better than Luke. They were alone together, before, needing none but each other. Now, she is just alone, and lonely, and she misses him, and hates herself for feeling weak without him.

 

 

The briefing begins when Mom addresses the crowd, comprised of the diplomats and military commanders directly involved in the action to come; they’ll brief their own teams after and in greater detail. This is just to make sure everyone is on the same wavelength. Leia nudges Artoo—she likes to record things, and review them to make sure she understands, and then delete them, because she’s not careless—and pushes all the emptiness and hurt aside to focus on Padmé Amidala.

Mom is always Padmé Amidala, Wellspring of the Alliance, in moments like these, when she stands like a pillar of flame in the Force, blazing with conviction. 

“Delegates, representatives, friends, and comrades,” Padmé Amidala says with authority ringing like a bell. Leia can’t see her face now, but she’s seen this rehearsed enough to know that the Wellspring is smiling. “Allies, and rebels. Welcome to Horizon.”

The warmth in her voice captivates; like everyone else, Leia shifts closer, more attentively, a field of flowers turning to follow the sun. 

“We have gathered here to officially begin a full scale war against the illegitimate regime of the Galactic Empire,” Amidala says. “After a decade of preparation, diplomacy and guerrilla tactics, we unite the independent cells on Lothal and Jedha, the freedom fighters of Ryloth and Tatooine, the sovereign systems of Dathomir, Utapau, Geonosis, and Dac and two thousand more—Republican and Independent Systems—for the rights intrinsic to every sentient being of freedom, justice, and self-determination. We will take on the Empire, and together, we will _win.”_

Mon Mothma speaks next, elegant and somber in mourning whites. “We will do this by attacking three Imperial-held systems simultaneously: Mandalore, Kuat, and Naboo. These targets have been chosen with care and deliberation. Each, once won, provides a distinct advantage to our cause: Kuat offers manufacturing capabilities, Mandalore, skilled fighters, and Naboo, a psychological edge. Furthermore, each of these systems has built an extensive and effective infrastructure of rebels and allies. We can thus divide Alliance forces between the three and carry out simultaneous orbital and planetary strikes.”

“Once liberated,” Obi-Wan continues, “each system will immediately contribute to the next set of targets, as negotiated by our diplomats, and so on. Meanwhile, concurrent with the main attacks, independent cells will escalate activity in their own sectors and systems. In this way, we hope to prevent Imperial reinforcements from targeting the cells, and increase the number of systems liberated at the end of each cycle.”

“This will take significant military strength,” says Mace Windu, “which is why Jedi will be leading the primary attacks and rotating among the cells. We have been fortunate to recruit three battalions of clone troopers to the cause, and they will be essential to the primary attacks. But soldier for soldier, the Empire outnumbers us, so we’re relying on stealth, surprise, and strategy to win the day.”

“This,” says Draven, “is where we come in. With support from each system’s intelligence networks and our Jedi allies, we have created specialized strategies for each target, with the goal of minimizing casualties, particularly non-combatants, and removing Imperial presence as swiftly as possible.”

“The first battle will be at Mandalore,” says Bail Organa. “The Houses of Wren and Kryze will initiate planetary rebellion. Once Imperial reinforcements arrive, Alliance forces led by General Madine, Master Windu, and Senator Mothma will arrive to engage orbital attacks and reinforce the Mandalorian rebellion on the planet. Allies from Dathomir will coordinate with Lady Ventress and Master Windu to support Alliance and Mandalorian forces.”

“Kuat is the second target,” says Luminara Unduli, calm and precise and austere as ever in her unrelenting black. “I will be leading this battle with General Dodonna and Senator Organa. Knight Offee and Master Ti will accompany me; Master Ti especially has strong ties to the shipyard unions who will initiate the battle, again, on the planet. Once we have gained the shipyards, manufacturing will begin immediately, as Master Ti has negotiated a fair and reasonable work contract with the unions and secured their cooperation. Any ships requiring repair should make for Kuat. We will send as many ships as we can captain to the third battle.”

“This,” says Wellspring, and Leia does not have to see her face to know how her eyes burn with fervor, “is Naboo. Master Kenobi and Master Yoda will lead with Admiral Ackbar and General Draven, in a joint offensive with the Naboo Royal Security Forces and the Gungan militia. This battle, barring unanticipated success on Mandalore or Kuat, will commence while the others are ongoing, thus dividing Imperial battalions and engaging them on as equal measures as we can. We anticipate that as the other battles conclude, Imperial remnants will make their way to Naboo. As this is Chancellor Palpatine’s homeworld, he will be loath to give it up. We expect the fighting there to be most brutal.”

“Now,” says Aunt Ti, who is never not Aunt Ti, “while the main battles are ongoing, the Partisans on Jedha will cause trouble there, while Ghost squadron does the same on Lothal, and we have agents placed on Kessel, Savareen, Kashyyyk, Serrano, Utapau, Ryloth, Bothawui, Corellia, and throughout the Core to divert and exhaust Imperial attentions.”

“This plan will work,” says Padmé. “None of us have been idle these last ten years. We have recruited, we have spied, we have infiltrated and raised funds and trained. We are _ready,_ friends. Now: let us rebel.”

 

 

There’s more, because there always is: after the Command briefing, the planetary forces split for more focused briefings. After that, they’ll brief the chains of command, all the way to X-Wing squadron leaders, and that’ll take the rest of the day. When they break for dinner, Mom will stand again, remade into a symbol, not a woman, and she will tell every pilot, every mechanic, every cook and spy and diplomat and general what the beginning of this war means to all of them, what each sacrifice of blood and sweat and love has birthed here at the edge of hope, at the end of a decade of grief, at the horizon of all that’s to come.

 

 

But Leia doesn’t get the time to decide if she wants to follow these briefings (she should; Mom would be proud of her, and scared for her, and thrum with eager, relieved intensity that Leia is more like her than her father), or the chance to ask if she may (of course she may; but the family wants to know where she is, always, and she understands—if she loses track of any of them for too long, she starts to panic, too). Auntie Dormé appears before her, discovering her behind Artoo, eyes warm with her quiet kind of love.

“Hello, Leia,” she says. 

“Auntie Dormé,” Leia whispers, and ducks forward into the warm sweep of Dormé’s robes. 

Dormé folds around her, arms strong like a plasma shield. “It’s been a while, my love. Shall we catch up?”

Leia looks to her parents for permission; Mom is busy in discussion with Mon Mothma, but Mama catches her eye and nods with a smile, a blown kiss. 

Leia tucks her hand into Dormé’s, hiding in the drape of her sleeve, and follows her, Artoo whirring into action in their wake. 

 

 

Dormé is so sweet and soft and thoughtful that Leia sometimes forgets that she’s Mom’s most trusted spy, that Dormé has lied to Vader and Palpatine in person, at the same time, and survived; that Dormé’s tenderness sheathes a core of kyber. She blazes, when she wants to, when she intends to. She doesn’t now, but then, Leia is not the sort of person who requires that from her aunt.

Dormé is not the sort of person to require things from others. She speaks, soft and easy, in her quarters, pouring fine Naboo tea and setting out dried and candied fruits, nuts, a bar of chocolate for them to share, while Arnine charges in the corner and whistles conversationally with Artoo. Leia nibbles on a nut, and drinks her tea, because Mama and Mom had taught her to be polite, and the art of the tea ceremony on their homeworld. 

“Your grandparents are well,” she says. Leia has never met them, but Mom tells stories of her blood-sisters and Leia’s cousins, though it’s been years since Mom’s seen them. Dormé sips her tea with enviable grace, each sip silent; Leia does so as best she can, but slurps by accident at the beginning, as Dormé talks quietly of Naboo, their family, what awaits them there. 

There are pauses living between Dormé’s careful sentences: left for Leia to wind her way through, if she chooses, and though she keeps her quiet now, something wounded in her sags in relief, that Dormé doesn’t ask this of her.

Not that Mom and Mama and Socks and Obi-Wan and Cody ask it of her, but it’s different: they’re so busy, always, that they barely have time to sit quietly with her, or leave her be, or talk the way Dormé does now, deft as a weaver on a loom. 

“Would you help me unpack?” Dormé asks, as Leia finishes her tea, and the fruit on the platter. Leia knows very well that Dormé does not need the help, but she’s always loved looking at her clothes, and the ease of the task promises a respite. 

Dormé opens her valise, and props up the dress rack. Most of the clothes are plain—some, vacuum-sealed in synthetic bags, even have dark, messy stains—but there are silks, too, that run like water through Leia’s fingers, fine brocade sewn stiff as armor, embroidery twisting like aurabesh in her hands. 

“We’re going to Naboo, then,” Leia says. Mom’d never go anywhere else. She’s wanted to liberate Naboo as long as Leia’s been alive. 

“We are,” Dormé says, a rare, radiant smile breaking through. “I can’t wait for you to see it, Leia. We’re finally going home.”

The word stabs at her, piercing the numbness with which she’s guarded herself, and Leia flinches. Home—she has no homeworld, does she? Home is the Spark, and her mothers, the Aunties and the Jedi and Obi-Wan, Cody and Artoo and Threepio, Socks and Rex and B and—

“Luke—” she says haltingly, and falls quiet. There’s a howl in her throat, choking her words, and if she tries to speak around it she’ll scream and never ever stop.

“Yes,” Dormé says quietly. “It is not right that Luke is not with us. That he may not see Naboo with you.”

The fabrics, smooth, soft, stiff, pull at the thread of her grief. She unravels, like so much yarn. “Without him, it feels—empty, and dark, and cold, and closed-off,” Leia confesses, the words spilled like blood, that swallowed scream the wound from which they pour. She has never tried to explain the Force to someone not Force-sensitive, has never tried to explain the shining oasis glimmering between her and Luke to another Force user, but then, she’s never needed to: Luke has always understood her perfectly. But Dormé has a quiet to her that reminds Leia of her brother. “Like a world winking out of existence.”

She’s been reading, more, on her own. Her diction betrays her. 

“Apocalypse,” Dormé offers, soft. “Have you encountered that?”

“Yes,” Leia says, meaning both _i know what it means_ and _it is the negative space where my brother should be,_ and Dormé nods.

“There is a school of thought,” she says, “which considers apocalypse not to be singular or unique, but potentially plural, possibly reflected in the mirrors of sentient experience. That is: a world ends. A possible future vanishes to live only in those who imagine it. But life endures. You expected a certain future that will no longer come to pass: that realization can be catastrophic. But it does not mean that there is no future.” She reaches her hand to Leia, calluses reassuring in their rough tactility, like a benediction. 

“Tragedy does not have to mean absolute loss,” Dormé says softly. “There is always hope. If you hold onto nothing else from your mothers, from your aunts, from your brother, hold onto hope.”

Artoo whistles rather rudely from the doorway, and Dormé rolls her eyes, playing along. Her thumb swipes gently across Leia’s cheek, catching a tear before it can smudge the woad. 

“My heart,” Dormé says, tender as a bud in the moments before bloom. “Hand me the blue cloak, if you please.” 

 

 

Before leaving, Leia puts herself back together as best she can. Cosmetics don’t fix anything, not really, but they disguise the fractures enough that she can pretend they’re not there.

“We wear these signs not for ourselves,” Dormé says gently, offering the pot without being asked. “We wear them for our people, Leia. The scar of remembrance commemorates the great tragedy of the Naboo, when we warred against each other. The Time of Suffering. The circles on each cheek represent the scales of justice we carry in everything we do, and the reminder to act in its name. The tears you wear? Their purpose is not to remove you from your grief, my love. It is to acknowledge and carry that grief with honor and grace.”

“I’d rather have Luke,” Leia says quietly. “Is there a symbol for that?”

“We will make one,” Dormé promises.

In the end, Leia chooses the silver paint, and Dormé carefully marks a six-pointed star onto each cheek. From far enough away, they look like circles; only those close enough to hug will see the points, and those are the only ones who were dear enough to call her and Luke _stars_.

_I am not alone,_ the stars will say. _I hold my brother in every part of my self. I will find him and call him back, as inexorably as gravity, as powerfully as a sun._

_All stars are suns, too._

 

 

Artoo sees her back to the command hub, whistling in some Binary that’s not really anything in the way that small talk isn’t really anything. It’s enough to guard the sense of something not quite solid enough to call restfulness, let alone peace. It might be frail enough to call hope.

She says as much to Artoo, too settled in reflection to switch to Binary, but Artoo understands her anyway. 

A boy, dark hair, nose hooked like a falcon, turns as he passes, smiling like a beacon. “Hope isn’t frail,” he says. “Don’t you know? Rebellions are built on hope.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \+ not to get on the solo train but EVEN THO TLJ WAS A CRIME AGAINST STAR WARS....solo is good and tons of fun and surprisingly #woke in a post colonial sense and y’all should see it  
> \+ me, coming out of the theater: how can i rework the mercy cut to include val? enfys nest? L3? qi’ra? there are some gr9 ladies folks and i love all of them  
> \+ fave line: “oh, a girl! is she pretty? does she have sharp teeth?” —how i will evaluate all my future dates tbh #disasterqueer  
> \+ actual fave line: “you will never have a sounder sleep than in a wookiee’s lap” GO ON.....?!? #wookieecuddles  
> \+ are these tags working or not i’m 2 Stressed 2 Tell  
> \+ Dormé is talking about ~~~POSTHUMANISM which is basically the only thing keeping me sane in These Trying Times  
> \+ love to you all, thank you for the comments! i’m so sorry i’m So bad at replying to them but know that i read and appreciate every one and basically flop around like a pancake of love whenever I get a notification for this fic :)  
> \+ next up: war drums across the galaxy


	4. four: luke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every interaction with Anakin is like a duel: rhetorical blows landed, arguments barbed and catching beneath the skin, the saber-burn of conviction. A thought feinted, and parried out of hand. A counterattack falling just short of making a point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sneaking JUST under the wire to keep to the once monthly updates! happy harry potter’s birthday, y’all.
> 
> (fyi, the first section is actually the last in a thing i felt like trying. does it work? who knows!)

Boots click in the briefing room next door, a staccato drumming tempo. 

“Tell me,” says Anakin tersely.

“My lord,” says someone else, and swallows audibly. This is a common reaction to Anakin, Luke’s discovered. Even those on his side fear him down to their blood. It pumps thin and fast in their veins whenever he’s around.

“Mandalore, my lord,” says another officer—Luke’s assuming; hidden in the next room, he can’t see anyone, but he’s listening as hard and as unobtrusively as he can. “The Rebel fleet has come out of hiding to attack Imperial forces on Mandalore.”

“The fleet?”

“As near as we can tell, my lord. We’ve seen these ships in previous altercations. Intel from the surface indicates that Dodonna is in command. And there is one report of a Jedi.”

“Set course for Mandalore, then,” says Anakin brusquely. “Chart the quickest route, alert the fleet, and enter hyperspace as soon as we’re ready. In the meantime, get me the Emperor.”

“Yes, my lord,” several people say at once, and the boots scatter like a cup of marbles dropped on the floor.

The Emperor. Luke has not met him—wants, with animal instinct, to be nowhere near him. He pulls himself inward, winding every torn and ragged thread of Force-sensitivity back into a tiny, infinitesimal ball that he can tuck safely into the cage of his ribs. If the Emperor is looking this way, Luke does not want to be noticed.

The door opens without warning. From his perch in the chair in the corner, Luke looks up. Anakin stares at him, unreadable. 

“That’s a neat trick,” he says, evidently a peace offering. “Who taught you how to do that?”

Luke grimace-smiles an apology. He’s not going to answer that.

“You know,” Anakin says, “some things I want to know just because I’m your father. Not because I’m fighting against your mother.”

Privately, Luke thinks that the two are inseparable. Didn’t Anakin fall because of them? If he were not their father, he would not be fighting against their mother. But Luke doesn’t respond: this isn’t what Anakin came here to say.

“Move down a few rooms,” Anakin says after a moment. Emotions roil contradictorily inside him; Luke knows this just by watching. Secrecy and fear and protection and determination. “I have an important transmission to make. Not for your ears.”

 _You’re not for_ his _ears,_ the fear whispers, and Luke knows Anakin means the Emperor.

“Okay,” he says, and unspools from the chair, and makes for the door. He doesn’t want the Emperor to see him either. At least Anakin is keeping this promise.

“Luke,” says Anakin. 

Luke pauses.

A crooked smile, the kind that could pick the lock to someone’s heart. “See you in the salle?”

Luke counterfeits a grin, and closes the door behind him.

 

 

Despite the dusty heat of the market, Luke’s last impressions of Cyphar are frosted over, refracted and distorted. Obi-Wan and his hand and his saber lying dismembered in the path. The too-rhythmic crunch of stormtrooper boots. The wail of blasterfire and its aftermath. Brown hair, brown eyes, fine brows at the edge of his vision.

He keeps his eyes forward. He does not turn around, he does not cry for his mother. He does not run to her, though every wounded part of him screams for the safety of her arms. Here, now, she can’t save him, and he can only save himself by trying to survive, minute to minute.

On the shuttle, a medic—the same worn features as Rex and Cody—attends to his scraped cheek and hands, the swollen bruise on his knee, the strain in his shoulder from trying to support Obi-Wan. Anakin stares at Luke with a desperate, possessive greed, as though cataloguing every cell and expression to keep forever.

When the medic leaves, Anakin speaks.

“You’re quiet.”

A bubble of incredulous panic bursts on the tip of Luke’s tongue; he just barely holds it in. “I’m cold,” he says. _I’m in shock,_ he wants to say, _can’t this wait?_

Anakin rises, removing his own cloak in a practiced gesture. Less smoothly, he settles it around Luke’s shoulders, all but drowning him in the black wool. 

“Space is cold,” Anakin says, the words not quite his own. His hands, gloved in black synthleather, clench over his thighs. “Where—where have you lived?”

There is a chasm of yearning behind his words. Luke clings to the precipice, and tries not to fall.

“I don’t think I should tell you that,” Luke says carefully. He pulls the cloak tighter, sees Anakin track the movement, and swallow whatever he’d been about to say.

“Your mother was in the market,” Anakin says.

Luke says nothing.

“That’s not a question,” Anakin clarifies. “We know this. Security holos and witness accounts place her there with you and—him.”

“I thought you killed all the witnesses,” Luke says thoughtlessly, and freezes.

Anakin’s hands spasm again. Abruptly, he stands, looming in the dark of the shuttle.

“You’re in shock,” he says, as though to himself. “I’ll let you rest. We’ll be back at the _Devastator_ soon.”

 

 

A stormtrooper comes to get Luke as they approach the _Devastator_. Ghost-white, unbending as bone, the blaster insectoid and strange held across his chest plate, the trooper beckons him from the small cabin to the main hangar, where he can see the Star Destroyer poised in front of them unforgivingly. 

Anakin—his father—is piloting. The sight of him at ease over the flight controls wounds something in Luke, some tender part he hadn’t known to shield. He blinks, and he sees Obi-Wan in the co-pilot’s seat, stressed and disapproving; Ahsoka, attentive and exhilarated; Mom, stubborn and strange. He blinks again, and his family vanishes. A black-capped Imperial sits quietly, his objective seemingly to stay out of Anakin’s way. Anakin pilots alone. In the darkness of the shuttle, the reflected light of the _Devastator_ limns his hair like a comet. 

Luke raises a hand self-consciously to his own hair. Yellow as a desert, he’d thought, yellow as Tatooine from orbit. Nothing like the rich brown of his mothers, his sister. No, he looks like Anakin. The thought disturbs him.

He shivers, and pulls the cloak tighter. In the pilot’s seat, Anakin flinches, and turns. His eyes burn in the dark like fire, and Luke thinks _no,_ thinks _not my eyes,_ thinks _not his eyes,_ and squeezes his own shut. When he opens them again, Anakin is facing forward. 

The bay to which Anakin flies them is glaringly private. A droid and a single technician await them; the co-pilot, medic, and two troopers follow Anakin down the boarding ramp, Luke caught between them like prey above the sarlacc’s maw.

“Take him to my quarters,” Anakin orders. “See to it that he has everything he needs, Bo. Appo, Fox, go with them. Commander Jir—with me.”

Luke opens his mouth—to, what, protest? He isn’t safe with Anakin. But he’s safer with Anakin than without, here. He closes his mouth, swallowing the expectation that had assumed Anakin would stick close by, and catches Anakin watching him again, eyes slitted and amber. 

The medic nudges him gently, a hand to his uninjured shoulder, and Luke follows the troopers away from the ship, away from Anakin, away from the only family he has left.

 

 

In the suite adjacent to the hangar, the troopers shuck their helmets, and Luke stares. Appo and Fox and Bo are all clone troopers, and the realization unnerves him, like a wire pulled up the length of his spine. They look like Cody, like Rex, like home, and aren’t. 

“Hey, calm down now,” says the medic—Bo. “Y’ever seen us clones before? We’re perfectly friendly, don’t worry.”

“We’ll set up quarters for him,” says one of the troopers gruffly, and they move deeper into the suite.

Bo smiles Cody’s smile at him. “Hungry?” He doesn’t wait for Luke to respond, steering him into a kitchenette and raiding a drawer. “Boys your age always are. ’Specially after a hardship. Kids shouldn’t be in a war zone. Good thing we got you out, eh?” He winks, like a friend, and Luke swallows bile.

The hypocrisy galls. Kids shouldn’t be in war zones, no, but Anakin and his troopers had brought a war zone to Cyphar, to an interspecies trading market, where younglings like him, like Leia, ran between stalls with the eagerness of an explorer discovering a new world. Where families gathered sustenance, where communities forged friendships and alliances.

Kids shouldn’t be in war zones, but the clones had been children when they were sent to battle, and so had Ahsoka, and so had countless other Padawans. 

Kids shouldn’t be in war zones, and Luke has no right to be here, being fed and coddled by the enemy, while people who had been minding their own business die at the hands of his father’s army.

He barely makes it to the waste bin in time. After, he shudders to the floor, sour-mouthed and clammy, and Bo kneels down in front of him. 

“Let’s get you cleaned up, and into bed, then,” he says kindly. “Tea and crackers after, if you’re up to it.”

Luke does not want to be tucked into bed and soothed into sleep, except by Mom and Mama and Obi-Wan, with Leia cantankerous and tender at his side. To allow this care to a stranger, let alone an Imperial, burns like betrayal. 

But he’s exhausted, and feels disgusting, and his mothers are on another planet, and Obi-Wan was in pieces last Luke saw him. Luke wants to be comforted. He squeezes his eyes shut, hands twisting the black wool of his father’s cloak tighter and tighter. 

“When will he be back?” he makes himself ask. His voice sounds thin and raw in the silence of the suite.

“Lord Vader? Not for hours yet. Still a battle to finish, after all.” Bo scrutinizes him. “C’mon,” he says again. “You’ll feel better for a wash and a nap.”

Luke does not want to feel better. But he remembers Mom, painting herself courage with cosmetics and silk, and thinks he could use some of that strength.

 

 

He doesn’t mean to fall asleep. After the brisk wash and, under Bo’s watchful eye, eating the crackers and drinking the tea (not the green Naboo blend his mothers drank, and shared with him and Leia; this one is spiced like sand stirred by wind), Luke curls into the bed found by Appo and Fox, and doesn’t have to feign exhaustion. He hopes that this will prompt Bo to stop talking at him, and to leave him alone so he can try to sort through what’s happened and what may still, and attempt to navigate his way out of this mess.

Bo stops talking at him, but doesn’t really leave him alone. The door to the room he’s been given—some kind of closet, by the looks of it—stays pointedly open, and he and the other troopers talk quietly outside. Horribly, tears prick at his eyes at this—after everything’s been wrenched away from him, he can’t even have a moment to himself—but the clones’ voices are too familiar for his exhausted ears, and Luke doesn’t even realize he’s falling asleep until he wakes up.

Anakin is watching him in the dark, eyes shadowed. The only light comes faintly from the stars. Wordlessly, he reaches behind him and offers Luke a tissue.

“You were crying in your sleep,” he says as explanation, something dark in his voice that Luke can’t identify. Accusation? Self-recrimination? Anger, resentment, empathy or sympathy? Impossible to say.

Luke wipes at his cheeks with the offered tissue; they’re still damp where the salt hasn’t dried in itchy tracks. Anakin is watching him with that unforgiving intensity, and Luke realizes abruptly that he’s waiting for a response. 

“I miss my mom,” he says, and doesn’t have to fake the acute misery in his voice.

Anakin shudders. In the dark of the lightless suite, he looks like some terrible, hulking beast, a miserable creature brought forth from collective nightmare. 

At length, Anakin says roughly, “I know. I feel it, too.”

Then _WHY_ , Luke wants to scream, but like everything else since the Imperials invaded Cyphar, he swallows it down, packing it into a small, compact ball and pressing until the anger fades away. 

“You’re good at that,” Anakin notes. His eyes crinkle at the corners; his voice parses approval with ruefulness. “Much better than I was, at your age. I suppose Obi-Wan’s told you all about what a failure I was.” Bitterness, now, undisguised.

“No,” Luke says, bewildered by the accusation. Obi-Wan has never so much as hinted that Anakin was a failure. Yoda was another story altogether, but better not bring him up, especially not if Anakin doesn’t know he’s alive. “Obi-Wan says the Jedi failed you. He failed you.”

A muscle twitches in Anakin’s jaw. “I find that hard to believe.” But there’s a terrible, devouring yearning in his shadowed gaze, and he leans forward unconsciously, as though unable to help himself. 

“He loves you,” Luke whispers.

“You don’t know that,” Anakin says sharply. “How could you know something like that?”

The answer comes to him immediately: Obi-Wan’s tender sorrow, the wistful guilt in his eyes when he looks at Luke.

“He looks at me, and sees you,” Luke says. “He misses you. He loves you.”

“He left me to die,” Anakin snaps. “Did he tell you about that, too?”

“No,” Luke says. “Mom did.”

Anakin jerks back, as though burned, as though struck across the face. 

“She was confused,” he says quietly. “She was trying to protect you.”

“She was trying to protect me, and the Republic,” Luke answers, just as quiet. “Uncle Obi was trying to protect her, and the Republic.”

Grief wars with rage on Anakin’s face, as brief and brutal as lightning splitting a sky. 

“He failed you,” Anakin says coldly. “Like he failed me.”

Luke knows before he says it that it’s stupid, that it’s reckless and dangerous because Anakin is wild and tripwire-tense. A storm builds under his father’s skin, in the strange yellowing of his eyes, and Luke sees it, and speaks anyway.

“He didn’t fail Mom.”

Anakin’s eyes flash yellow; a blue-white line of electricity crackles over the knuckles of his ungloved hand, and then dissipate inwards, and his eyes are blue again.

“Of course he did,” Anakin says, standing. “You’re here with me. He could not have failed her more terribly had he tried.”

He smiles, crooked and unexpectedly sincere. “Rest, Luke,” he says. “We’ll speak more in the morning.”

The room is cold in his wake.

 

 

The cloak lies still at the foot of Luke’s bed. He stares at it, considers it like Mama would— _what will it look like, for him to see you warmed by his hand?_ —and Leia— _he took you away! don’t you dare give him a scrap_ —and, finally, Mom. _Light-bringer_ , he imagines her saying, leaning in close to embrace him, to press her nose to his temple, her mouth to his cheek, her hand to the line of his jaw. _My brave star. If you are cold, warm yourself. If you hunger, feed yourself. Be strong, Luke, and remember our love for you._

The cloak, when he pulls it to his chin, smells like the plasma burn of a lightsaber, like the aftermath of blaster fire. Like blood and dust and salt from his own tears. It does not smell like his mothers’ milk-and-blossom soap, like the herbal tea Leia once spilled in their bed, like the oils he and Cody use to clean Artoo and Threepio, like the sweat and sorrow worn into the collar of Obi-Wan’s robes. 

Luke screws his eyes shut and pulls in on himself, knees to chest, arms wrapped tight. If he lets go even a little, he thinks, he’ll fall to pieces. The ragged wound of his connection to Leia howls like a missing limb. He wants to go home. He wants to be held by his mothers, to be known by his sister. Salt stings at his eyes.

He breathes harshly, once, twice, and presses the fear and hurt down. He fears to release them with Anakin so close by, with the Emperor surely attuned to this ship. And he has a part to play, doesn’t he?

Here is what Luke knows:

1\. Anakin cannot be trusted. He serves the Emperor. His actions pit him against everything Mom and Mama and Uncle Obi-Wan and Socks and the Aunties have fought for. 

2\. Anakin does not think he is on the wrong side of things. He will try to convince Luke of this. Luke must hold tight to everything his family has taught him to survive.

3\. Anakin is Luke’s only ally on the Imperial side of things. To a certain extent, therefore, Anakin is the only person Luke can trust right now.

4\. The only reason Anakin is not an enemy is because he is Luke’s father, and biological coincidence is too thin a foundation to foster trust.

5\. Some part of Anakin knows this. Unless Luke tries to intervene, it is simply a matter of time before Anakin acknowledges that political difference outweighs biological similarity in a war for the galaxy’s future.

6\. Luke…does not want to intervene. For all that he’s learned how to tell a story, he’s a terrible liar. To lie to Anakin and be discovered would be a death sentence. To lie to Anakin and get away with it would be a betrayal of himself.

Because this, really, is what Luke knows: The universe is made of pain shot through with kindness. Anakin suffers; in some way, he has never not suffered. Luke can, if he tries, be kind to Anakin’s pain. This isn’t about whether or not Anakin deserves to suffer, as he has made countless billions suffer. It isn’t even about whether or not Luke deserves to inflict more pain or to offer kindness. 

It’s about faith, and belief; about right and wrong and the grey line of balance between the two. Anakin is wrong, and Luke has always tried to make things right. He probably won’t succeed, but he still has to try.

Right now, it’s his best shot at protecting Leia.

 

 

Every interaction with Anakin is like a duel: rhetorical blows landed, arguments barbed and catching beneath the skin, the saber-burn of conviction. A thought feinted, and parried out of hand. A counterattack falling just short of making a point.

Luke sees Anakin every rotation, as the invasion of Cyphar mutates into an occupation; as reinforcements arrive to keep the order Anakin has written in blood. Often, the only time they see each other is at night, when Luke jerks from uneasy sleep to catch Anakin staring at him, wrecked with yearning, eyes darting over his frame as though to memorize every single part of him.

Then, as the invasion fades and occupation rises in its place, Anakin finds him at breakfast. 

“You’ve been trained?”

“Some,” Luke says warily. That Anakin knows something of Luke’s sensitivities is self-evident; what exactly Luke can keep up his sleeve is what might make him free.

“Lightsaber?” Anakin asks.

Luke starts, stares in surprise. Anakin grins, ruinously sincere. “C’mon,” he says. “I’ve got something for you.”

He leads Luke from the dining hall to a room far from the docking bay, at the very end of the suite. Immediately, Luke sees its purpose: to contain a lightsaber battle. Dark lines are seared into the pale walls, but don’t seem to have damaged them other than cosmetically; along one wall, a rack of training droids sits, waiting for an opponent. 

“Here,” Anakin says, “catch;” and he tosses Luke a lightsaber.

Luke catches it out of instinct more than anything. The grip is nearly as long as his forearm, and weighty in a solid, indestructible way. When he turns it on, it thrums in his hands like a wild thing, and burns like the noontime sky on Tatooine before him.

“Top switch,” Anakin says, “for training mode. You’ve held one before.”

“Not a real one,” Luke says, not one that hasn’t been hobbled for the safety of their ship.

“I’m not surprised,” Anakin says, acerbic. “Obi-Wan always underestimated me, too.”

“He’s protective,” Luke protests, and knows it’s futile when Anakin shakes his head.

“He underestimates, he’s overprotective, it’s all the same, really.”

It’s not, at all, but Luke is—tired, of arguing, of being bruised against the strength of Anakin’s delusion. He wants a moment of rest. He lets it go.

“There’s a trick to it,” Anakin says, returning to the lightsaber, thankfully content to let it go, perhaps feeling the same exhaustion Luke feels, battered against the other’s conviction. “Feel it out in the Force. We’re all just atoms floating through empty space. The saber’s atoms can be yours, too, if you let them. Watch.”

Luke looks at him expectantly.

“Not with your eyes,” Anakin says, smiling, and Luke lets himself unfurl, just a little. When Luke looks at him through the Force, his father is a black and empty shadow, compact and contained with power Luke has never seen before. Satisfaction limns his silhouette like sunlight.

“There you are,” Anakin murmurs warmly. “Look at you.”

“Show me,” Luke says, and Anakin does. In the Force, his hands, even the one Luke can sense is not organic, seem to hum, and so does the red saber, until they seem to join as one limb, one line of nerves stretching like mycelium from the hilt to the length of Anakin’s spine, the bright star of his heart, except they aren’t nerves, Luke realizes: they’re midi-chlorians, singing the songs of cells and atoms, of stars and their hearts of kyber. Anakin has networked them, reached back as they reach for them. 

And he offers this magic to Luke, as though it’s nothing.

Because this is magic: it is unprecedented, so far as Luke knows, and Luke has learned, if haphazardly, with the greatest Jedi living. With the only Jedi living. Those only who were canny enough to escape his father and the blade he wields like it’s a part of him, because it is.

Yoda does not fight like this. Mace Windu does not fight like this. Obi-Wan and Ahsoka, whose styles most closely match Anakin’s, have never conversed with their sabers like this. 

“Where did you learn this?” Luke whispers.

“I didn’t,” Anakin says, a little proud, a little smug. “I figured it out on my own.”

Well, that’s better than having it bestowed by the Emperor, or tainted with the Dark Side. 

But still, there’s a risk in setting precedent, a word Leia—Leia. Stars, how he misses her—had caught like a fish from their mothers’ conversation, reeled in and landed in demanding a definition. To accept this from Anakin is to set precedent. To not accept it is to declare Luke Anakin’s prisoner, enemy, not child to be protected and taught. 

Obi-Wan sits behind his ear, eyes shadowed in grief. _No one needs a lightsaber to do good, he’d said. That’s a lesson I did not learn well enough. That the Jedi did not learn well enough._

He could invoke Mom, her unwavering belief in peace and nonviolence, her absolute conviction in the evil of war.

But Luke needs to connect with Anakin, and to protect himself. And, if he’s honest, he sees the galaxy of networked midi-chlorians and wants, with unwise eagerness, to know what it’s like.

He looks up at Anakin’s blue eyes, faintly red with the reflection of his saber. “Teach me,” he says, “please.”

Light burns, blinding and terrible, in the slice of Anakin’s grin, the exultation and triumph and pride of his smile. Luke wants to learn, but Anakin wants more than to give; he wants to be wanted. It’s enough to break a heart, Luke’s heart, already bruised and battered with loss. 

 

 

They leave Cyphar. Luke watches, blank-faced, from the broad pane of transparisteel in Anakin’s suite, as Anakin stands beside him.

“It’ll be okay,” Anakin says quietly. “We’ll find her.”

Luke doesn’t know if he’s talking to himself or to Luke. He doesn’t ask. 

 

 

From Cyphar, they go to Mustafar. Anakin goes to the planet surface; Luke does not, and spends the time in orbit mostly huddled under Anakin’s cloak in what has become his own room. Bo stays with him, keeping up a constant and undemanding conversation, a kindness that helps Luke set aside the hate, and fear, and pain that radiate malignantly from Mustafar’s surface. When Bo sleeps, and Luke can’t, he closes his eyes tight and imagines his family around him. 

_My star_ , whispers Mama, sweet-smelling like her soap, the tea she drinks before bed. _You have been so brave. Be brave a little while longer._

 _Luke_ , says Obi-Wan. _Hold onto your kindness. Protect that in you which is gentle. These are what will see you through this trial._

 _Oh_ , Luke imagines replying, this _is a trial?_

 _Dear boy_ , Obi-Wan says fondly.

 _Tiny one_ , says Cody affectionately, Rex at his side. _You know us. You’re with our brothers. You’re not alone, even if it feels that way. They’re not us, but they are. Family’s odd like that._

Socks settles warm behind him. _Hey, Luke,_ she says gently. _How’re you holding up?_

He tucks himself closer, or imagines it: the tender skin of her lekku on his cheek, the strength of her arms around him.

 _Yeah,_ she says. _I know. I know. But you’re keeping yourself safe, Luke, and that’s the most important thing._

 _No lines about how there’s still good in him?_ Luke asks.

 _No,_ Socks says fiercely. _That doesn’t matter right now._

 _I think it might be the only thing that matters,_ Luke confesses, and when he looks up, it’s Mom who holds him.

 _Sweet, brave boy,_ she says, tears glittering like stars in her eyes. _My son. How I love you._

He’ll cry if he speaks; he bites his tongue.

 _You’re doing so well, Luke,_ she whispers, a kiss pressed against his brow like a blessing. _I’m so proud of you._

 _I want to come home,_ he whispers back. He can barely shape the words; they emerge like stones coughed up from his throat.

 _Dear heart,_ Mom says. _You will. I swear to you. I swear it._

And then—there’s Leia, silhouetted and pale in the doorway. Grief has branded itself beneath her eyes; on each cheek, she wears a silver six-pointed star.

 _Luke,_ she cries, starting towards him, beginning to run. _Luke! I can’t believe—it’s you—is it really you?_

 _Leia,_ Luke cries back, prudence forgotten by his loneliness. _Leia! Stars, how I’ve missed you._

 _Brother,_ she says, and stumbles in a well of shadows. _Luke—we’re coming for you, we’ll get you back, I’m coming, Luke—I love you—_

Cold leaches any clarity from the room, and she vanishes. Anakin stands in her place, an unreadable look on his face.

“Who was that?” he demands. “Luke—who were you talking to?”

“No one,” Luke says, bloodless with fear. “I—no one.”

“Something we have in common,” Anakin says: “we’re both terrible liars. Who were you talking to? What did you tell them?”

“I wasn’t talking to anyone!” Luke cries.

 _“Tell me,”_ Anakin snarls, eyes gone yellow with rage, and Luke has always been afraid of his father, but it pales to the terror that chokes him now.

“My lord,” says someone from outside.

Anakin whirls. Luke sees the edges of stormtrooper armor, and recognizes Appo’s posture. 

“Urgent news, my lord. Your presence is requested in the briefing room.”

“Fine,” snaps Anakin. “Let’s go.”

He doesn’t look at Luke as he leaves.

Luke waits until he hears the doors slide shut, and follows. He wants to hear what’s going on. His hands tremble, so he tucks them under his arms and holds himself tightly. _You knew this would happen,_ he tells himself, willing repetition to make it true, and he had known that Anakin cannot be trusted, cannot be trusted to be kind, but to know it and to experience it are two entirely different things. There is knowing, Yoda had said once, incomprehensibly, to Mom, and there is _knowing._ Luke had always wondered what it meant: to know Anakin? the Force? Now he wonders if it had just been another one of Yoda’s infuriating aphorisms, always vague enough to apply to every situation.

And—Leia. He’s seen her. He must have. If it was imagined—if only it were imagined, that they might both be safe from Anakin—but if he only imagined her—if he’s going mad here on this ship, with only his father’s misery for company—Luke doesn’t know what he’ll do. If he’s going mad enough to actually communicate with Leia, pulling her into his danger, he doesn’t know how he’ll live with himself. 

Guilt roils in his stomach, along the nerves of his arms and neck and spine like acid. Like a hurricane thousands of kilometers long, a scar of wrath howling on the surface of a gas giant. Abruptly, his legs give out on him; he collapses to the floor, shaking uncontrollably, breathing too fast, too loud. He cannot feel his hands.

In the corner of his eye, Mama approaches, her long green skirts sweeping the tiled floor like a meadow. She kneels before him, takes his senseless hands in hers, those long fingers curved over his like shields. _My son,_ she says, so very softly, so very gently. _Breathe with me. In, out. In, out. In, and out._

When he can think again: _I’m sorry._

_Dearest—for what?_

Shame burns in his cheeks. _Being weak._

 _Oh, Luke,_ Mama says tenderly, and gathers him to her. _My star, my son. To be afraid is not to be weak. Do you know how I learned to calm panic like yours? For your mother._

Mom is always the strongest person he knows. Luke tucks his face into her neck, and nods.

 _You are so brave and so strong and I am so proud of you, Luke,_ she whispers. 

_I just feel so helpless._

_You’re not; you have yourself,_ Mama says, pulling back to look him in the eye. Her smile is so warm that he wants to weep, he misses her so much. _And you have our love, always. The darkness will not last forever, Luke. All things, even this, must end._

She’s gone, if she was ever even there, when he opens his eyes. Luke drags himself upright, and into a chair, curling in tight to hold himself together.

He can be brave, like Mom, and kind, like Mama, for just a while longer. He rests his chin on his knees, trains his attention on the briefing room next door, and listens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> idk, writing leia last chapter made me want to check in w my actual son, luke skywalker. then like halfway through i realized that i hadn’t written a SINGLE GODDAMN LADY and i was like????? i have betrayed not only myself but the ideals of my nation? @myself how can we fix this? BY SHOWING HOW MUCH LUKE LOVES HIS FAMILY. & we were needing some mom!sabé energy just, like, in general. (as was EVERYONE, lbr.)
> 
> Anyways i love all of you and i know I have AMAZING THOUGHTFUL BEAUTIFUL COMMENTS TO RESPOND TO i just always feel guilty doing that instead of...writing.....so hopefully i’ll Get to some tomorrow. even if i don’t respond for like...years i still treasure all of them.
> 
> (& if you feel like leaving me lengthy comments about how anakin is an innocent snowflake, consider: not doing that. Criticism is welcome! But if we have fundamentally different understandings of the character, then the only thing that will come of it is mutual frustration. & not the fun kind.)


	5. five: jyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It was the last thing she gave you, that faith,” Asajj says, a guess that cuts to the quick of that scar. “This is the last thing I give you for free, Hallik: my own faith. The Force follows its own will and its own interests. They rarely coincide with our own. Trust in yourself instead. You’ll live much longer that way.”

Jyn wakes when a lump of cloth is thrown, with unnecessary force, at her face.

“What—?” She’s sleep-roughened and hazy, squinting into the dim light of the room she shares with Asajj. She wants to go back to sleep. She wants the last eight years to have been a dream. She wants to have more than a crystal left of her mother.

“Get up,” Asajj says brusquely. “We’ve got places to be, plans to make.”

Life as usual, then. Jyn never gets what she wants. 

 

 

Despite being dressed, out in the cold of the hangars, and having splashed water on her face—a luxury, after Tatooine—Jyn still feels hazy at the edges. Like a sleepwalker. Steel wool, not a blade. The fluorescent lights sting her eyes, the edges of a headache. 

“Keep up,” Asajj snaps.

“Where’re we going?”

“To see Ahsoka.”

This strikes her as a deeply terrible idea. “I’m not a chaperone. You can’t just drag me around to make your mooning marginally more acceptable.”

“Ungrateful girl,” says Asajj bitterly. “I’m dragging you around to save your life. I’m being deployed to Mandalore. You’re not coming.”

This, more than the clothes thrown at her, the cold water on her face, the bright pale lights scintillating across metal and plastisteel, wakes her up.

“Wait,” Jyn says, jogging a few steps to catch up. “I’m with you—you _promised—”_

Asajj’s face, always severe as blade with her sharp cheekbones and cutting tattoos, softens ever so slightly. 

“I promised to keep you safe,” she says. “That was our deal. I am keeping my end. Mandalore will be a bloodbath, and I want you nowhere near it.”

“You—so you think the plan will fail?”

Asajj hesitates. “I didn’t say that.” She draws Jyn to the side of the corridor, out of the way of the many beings hustling through Horizon at what must be middle of the night. “The Mandalore contingent is leaving within the hour. I’m to report to Windu in thirty minutes. I don’t want you at Mandalore because it will be brutal. The Mandalorians have been fighting amongst themselves for centuries; they are very good at destruction. We will be lucky if they can keep their animosity aimed at the Empire for a week. Add to that the Nightsisters _and_ the Empire—if I have to worry about keeping you alive, I may not survive.”

“You’re very hard to kill,” Jyn whispers. It’s something Asajj had sneered to Toora enough over the two years they’d all worked together.

Asajj’s eyes glint. “I am,” she agrees. “Which should tell you how very worried I am, and how very dangerous this will be.” Her hand rises to cup Jyn’s face, make sure she can’t look away. “I promised to keep you safe, Jyn. Let me keep my promise. We will need to settle the debt. Let me ensure we live to do so.”

Jyn can’t speak: she nods, short and tight, and Asajj smiles her devil’s smile.

“Come on, then,” she says. And Jyn follows. 

 

 

It’s Barriss Offee who opens the door, austere in dark robes, eyes the blue of the lightsaber she’d carried yesterday: burning, unapproachable.

“What’s this?”

“I made a promise, but I can’t keep it,” says Asajj with blunt dislike. “Ahsoka will have to.”

“Ahsoka owes you nothing,” Barriss says coldly.

“Ahsoka owes me _everything,”_ Asajj snarls, and in the moment, Jyn wants nothing so much as to be back on Tatooine, drinking that paint thinner Toora ferments in the base. The hangover, the taste, Tatooine itself—all preferable to this. 

Which, given Jyn’s life experiences, isn’t saying much. Tatooine’s been the kindest to her, after all. 

But she doesn’t understand the tangle of passion and hate that stretches between these three Jedi. She’s not sure she wants to. She wants less to be trapped between them. They will, she thinks, try to use her against each other—except for Ahsoka, who mercifully appears.

“Asajj, Liana,” Ahsoka says. She’s radiant in the dark, the bright copper of her skin, the shining bands of her lekku. “What brings you here?”

“I’m off to Mandalore,” says Asajj harshly, and glowers, and Jyn realizes immediately that she thinks Ahsoka had something to do with that posting. “I’m not taking Liana there. But I promised her safety, and as you’re my keeper, that promise is now yours.”

“None of us will be safe,” Ahsoka says quietly. “Liana—is this your choice?”

Asajj glares at her, and Jyn finds her voice. “My choice is to survive,” she says. “I think my chances are better with you.”

Ahsoka evaluates her quietly, and then nods. “Alright.”

“Ahsoka!” Barriss objects.

“I took responsibility for Asajj,” Ahsoka says evenly. “If she cannot uphold her word due to that responsibility, then it is my duty to keep her oath.”

Barriss goes to her, her one long-fingered hand raising to brush Ahsoka’s coppery cheek. “You take too much on yourself,” she says quietly, and then Jyn looks away, because Asajj tugs her back to the door.

They stand just outside Ahsoka’s quarters. The base’s air is cold—Horizon is emptying, generators and all—and Jyn shivers in the too-bright light. She thinks the light might be like sunlight on snow, but she’s only ever seen holos of that, and everything looks the same shimmering blue in a holo. 

“Liana,” Asajj says sharply, “listen close and clever. This is the protection I can leave you. Your story is yours to tell, but you have been wise in keeping it to yourself. Do not tell Offee. She will go directly to Alliance command unless Ahsoka tells her otherwise, and Ahsoka’s duty to me may not stretch that far. If you must tell someone—” She casts about for an answer. “Tell Wellspring’s daughter,” she says at last. “She will understand the unwilling loss of a loved one. And her protection would outstrip even Ahsoka’s.”

“She’s _ten,”_ Jyn objects, a guess: Leia Naberrie could be anywhere from eight to twelve and Jyn would be none the wiser. She’s always been awful at kids, even when she was one. 

“Age matters not,” says Asajj. “Size matters not. You’re proof enough of that. Mark my words, precious girl: if the Rebellion succeeds, it will be because of her.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Something fervid and terrible burns in Asajj’s eyes. Her hands curl on Jyn’s shoulders, digging in like claws. “Your faith still sings around your neck,” she says softly.

Jyn nods, mute.

“It was the last thing she gave you, that faith,” Asajj says, a guess that cuts to the quick of that scar. “This is the last thing I give you for free, Hallik: my own faith. The Force follows its own will and its own interests. They rarely coincide with our own. Trust in yourself instead. You’ll live much longer that way.”

Asajj releases her then, nods, turns to go. Jyn jerks after her, tripwire tense. 

“The last thing you give me for free,” she rasps, and Asajj’s eyes gleam in the light.

“I told you—I always collect what’s owed.”

 

 

“Where am I going, then?” Jyn asks. Barriss Offee has vanished somewhere, and Ahsoka is checking two packs.

“Well first, you need to get your bag,” she says matter-of-factly. “Then, we’re to Nova Base. We’ll wait there for the signal and go to Naboo.”

Jyn blanches. “We’re really going to try to steal the Emperor’s homeworld?”

“We are going to reclaim Wellspring’s homeworld,” Ahsoka corrects. 

Jyn drops to the floor, runs her hands through her uncombed hair. She’d left it loose to dry after washing it, with real water, last night—an unbelievable luxury after Tatooine—and it’s still damp in places, and frizzed and too-dry in others. On Lah-Mu, this had been familiar, she thinks; it has not been familiar since. 

“I’m missing something,” she says to her knees. “I have to be missing something, or I’ve left Tatooine to get killed by the Empire, because this is the stupidest kriffing plan I’ve ever heard.”

Ahsoka’s looking at her strangely when Jyn looks up. 

“What?”

“Nothing,” Ahsoka says. “Just—you remind me of me, when I was around your age.”

“Is this also the stupidest kriffing plan you’ve ever heard?”

Ahsoka smiles, tiny, a crook of her lips that bows the white lines on her face. “No,” she says. “I’m pretty sure that was something my master came up back in the Clone Wars. He came up with so many idiotic schemes that should’ve gotten us killed, though—I’d have to really think to figure out which one was the dumbest.”

But Ahsoka’s still here. “Did your master come up with this one, too?” Jyn asks hopefully.

Any trace of humor vanishes from her face. “No,” Ahsoka says with finality. “No, I don’t think he would.”

“So how are we going to survive this?” 

Ahsoka holds her gaze, blue eyes steady and unbearably sincere. “Because the Empire doesn’t know our strength. And neither do you. But you’ll see it soon enough, Liana.” Her gaze shifts over Jyn’s shoulder, just as a droid whistles indignantly.

“In the meantime,” Ahsoka says, “I’m going to give you a job.”

 

 

The job is this: Follow Leia Naberrie and keep her and her droid out of trouble.

Jyn’s first panicked thought is that she’s desperately unqualified for this. Girls are monsters; Jyn would know. She was one until just recently. But Leia Naberrie is quiet to the point of concern; when she speaks, it’s to whistle at the blue-and-silver astromech, who keeps the conversation going practically alone. Jyn’s binary is passable, but not advanced enough to follow the complex syntax and grammar that whirs between Artoo and Leia. Younglings are better at languages, though, Jyn consoles herself. No need to feel hopelessly inadequate. 

Leia probably chose binary just to keep her secrets, anyway. Girls are monsters. 

She follows Leia to the emptying mess, and then through the emptying halls. She manages to pause them long enough to grab her things; Leia stares at the room Jyn had shared with Asajj with unfocused eyes, then blinks at Jyn.

“Did she leave anything for me?”

“Asajj?” Jyn asks.

“Ventress,” Leia confirms. “You—she left something with you for me.”

Jyn’s heart skips a beat. _If you must tell someone_ — Asajj had hissed. She swallows. 

“My mother’s faith,” she says.

Leia tilts her head, inquisitive, unblinking.

Her hands only shake a little as she draws out the crystal. Leia leans forward, curious, poised like a bird, and then settles back with a hum.

“It weighs on you,” Leia says. Her eyes are too discerning by half, Jyn thinks. Leia raises her hands to her cheeks self-consciously, where two silver stars shine faintly. “It shouldn’t. It wasn’t meant to. But it hurts. The weight of that love.”

Jyn’s throat is tight. “Yes,” she rasps, forcing the word out.

“I know what that’s like,” Leia says quietly. She looks at Artoo, who looks back. “My mother gave me my father’s name. It weighs like that.”

There’s a piece of the family puzzle there, an outline of absence that Jyn doesn’t know well enough to understand. She tucks the kyber back under her shirt and vest.

“How do you bear it?” Jyn whispers.

Leia smiles beyond her years. It does not reach her eyes. It holds no joy. “I don’t,” she says. “I cast it off.” She clambers to her feet, hand braced on Artoo, and goes to the door. “You’re stronger than me, Liana.”

Not even a half hour with the girl, and Leia’s already brought Jyn close to tears. This is going _great._

 

 

Leia leads them back to the command hub, silent and uncanny once more. The droid, too, is uncharacteristically quiet, and made uneasy enough by Leia’s reticence to swivel its dome to Jyn with a low, inquiring whistle.

“Tatooine before this,” she answers. “I was a forger for the freedom runners.”

She senses more than sees Leia’s sudden focus; the girl does not turn, does not falter, but there’s a line of tension in her shoulders that wasn’t there a moment ago. 

Artoo lets out an unflattering raspberry of disdain. 

Jyn shrugs. “I’ve been worse places.”

“So’s he,” Leia says. “He just really hates Tatooine.”

“What’s worse to a droid than sand?” Jyn wonders. Artoo’s Nubian in make, and Naboo is full of swamps, which is the only other ecosystem she can imagine would be worse for a droid.

Artoo beeps smugly at her, and Leia—miracle of miracles—giggles. Jyn thinks she’s not too far off in translating that as _Wouldn’t you like to know?_

She rolls her eyes at him; he whistles at Leia, and she whistles right back. Whatever mood Leia’d fallen into after Jyn’s necklace seems to have dissipated like so much steam.

 

 

The fragile sense of ease lasts until they make it to the command hub. Wellspring turns from a discussion—a thin-nosed man, a red-haired woman—to sweep Leia into her arms. Leia, for her part, goes willingly, wrapping herself around her mother and tucking her face into the crook of Wellspring’s neck. Wellspring’s eyes never leave Jyn.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Wellspring says, soft-spoken, but command undergirds her every word.

“Liana Hallik, my lady,” Jyn says, and, impulsively, sketches an awkward bow. Something in Wellspring’s demeanor inspires it; she stands like a queen. “I was recruited by Asajj Ventress on Tatooine as a forger.”

“And how did you come to be here, Liana Hallik?”

“My doing,” interrupts a voice from behind—Ahsoka, with marvelous timing, stepping into view. “Asajj left her with me, and I asked her to look after Leia while I was finishing preparations for Nova.”

“Hm,” is all Wellspring says to that, but Jyn thinks that Ahsoka is in for a tongue-lashing as soon as there’s no audience. Not entirely unjustified, surely; a mother has the right to approve those watching her children. Even Lyra had managed that, summoning Saw as the Imperials descended. 

Two women enter behind Ahsoka, each uncannily alike to Wellspring in coloring and bearing. The taller one continues forward unhesitatingly, kissing Leia’s cheek and Wellspring’s mouth. The second stops at Jyn’s side, and gives her a long, piercing look.

“Dormé,” Ahsoka says quietly, “this is—”

“I know who she is,” Dormé says calmly, and Jyn’s heart stops. “I’m an admirer of your forgeries…Liana Hallik.”

“Thank you, my lady,” Jyn manages, mouth dry. 

“How are you assigned, Liana?”

“She’s my charge,” Ahsoka interjects, shifting her balance as if to step between Jyn and Dormé and thinking better of it. 

Dormé slants her soft brown eyes to Ahsoka, calculating and still. “Andor,” she says after a moment.

A young man, near Jyn’s age, maybe a little older—he has an untidy scruff of beard stubbling his jaw, and his dark eyes and hooked nose suggest the predatory gaze of a raptor—steps to her side with military precision. He and Dormé exchange a look, and then he turns to face Jyn, expression blandly pleasant.

“Come on,” he says, and reaches for her arm.

She wrenches it out of the way, other hand going instinctively for her baton, but there’s a prick of silver at the skin of her throat, and she freezes.

“Hey,” Ahsoka snaps, moving to intervene, “watch it—” but Wellspring raises her hand, and Ahsoka, expression creased in confusion and concern, falters.

“Please,” Andor says, and summoning the scattered shreds of her pride, Jyn goes.

 

 

Andor takes her into the hall, where she can watch the argument between Dormé and Ahsoka and the rest of them play out in silence. A wall of transparisteel, but fantastic soundproofing. Odd priorities, that, but it works to Jyn’s advantage in the moment.

“You’re one of Ventress’ agents, then?” Andor inquires after a few minutes. “Why aren’t you with her?”

“Good kriffing question,” Jyn mutters. In the command hub, Wellspring’s gone pale, and Ahsoka still with shock; Leia, still in her mother’s arms, is watching Jyn unblinkingly. 

Dormé knows. How she knows barely matters—has she spoken with Saw? Found the Empire’s old wanted holos? Does she know about Galen?

Jyn shakes herself. It doesn’t matter. Galen is dead, if there is any mercy in the universe. Her identity was bound to out eventually. Only question now is what they’re going to do with her.

And then: hope, as Hondo Ohnaka rounds the corner, eyes widening comically beneath his goggles. 

“Liana!” he cries. “Friend of my lady Ventress! How are you this fine day?”

“Been better, Hondo,” she says tightly.

“Have you, now,” says Hondo. Though his voice rumbles with jovial warmth, his eyes are calculating, flitting from her to Andor to the scene in the command hub.

Andor shifts beside her, and steps forward. “This isn’t a good time, Captain—”

Hondo, all wiry scavenger strength, shoves Andor back into the wall hard enough that Jyn _hears_ the breath knocked from his lungs. She seizes her baton and snaps it open, striking the back of Andor’s knee so that he loses his balance and crumples to the floor. 

“Ah! I knew I liked you!” Hondo exclaims. “Quickly!”

He takes off at a sprint; Jyn pauses only long enough to see Dormé lunge toward the door before following. The crystal, Lyra’s kyber crystal, thuds gently against her sternum in time to her footsteps, and Jyn thinks of her mother’s faith and ferocity, how the two sanded down the razored edges of the pendant over the years, how each was inextricable from the other. _Let me get out of this,_ she thinks, holding the faded and blurry memory of her mother’s clear dark eyes in her mind; _Mama—you gave me life twice over—I won’t let them take that—help me—_

The kyber is warm against her skin. Jyn follows Hondo, and with a faith she carries by proxy, she trusts in the Force.

It’s not enough. It never has been.

A short, masked figure collides with Hondo as the first of the command council reaches them; he manages to scramble to his feet and dodge the masked being’s fellows, but Jyn’s hesitation costs her. Strong arms catch her from behind and tackle her to the unforgiving ground; a blue-and-white lekku sways at her cheek, but Ahsoka is up on her feet again a second later. “Hold her!” she shouts over her shoulder, and runs after Hondo.

Another being cuffs Jyn and drags her to her feet; Andor, winded and limping slightly, but planted solidly and immovable. The first of the masked figures shucks the mask, revealing freckles and riotous red hair. 

“Bad time?” she asks drily.

Andor has the temerity to laugh a little; Jyn hates them both, irrationally and petulantly, in that moment, and almost topples over trying to wrench herself free from Andor’s iron grip on her elbow. 

“Not intentionally,” he says to the woman once Jyn’s balanced again. “How’ve you been, Enfys?”

“Busy,” Enfys replies. “And productive, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know. Am I still to meet with her majesty?”

Andor must make a face, because Enfys makes one right back at him, a raised eyebrow, a smug quirk of her mouth.

“Once she’s dealt with,” Andor says, evidently restraining whatever he’d wanted to say in defense of—Wellspring, it must be; she’d been a queen, hadn’t she?

Enfys steps closer at this, peering at Jyn with too-perceptive grey eyes. “What is your story?” 

Jyn sets her jaw, and averts her gaze; another lesson Asajj had taught her, once upon a time, when she’d finally begun to trust her enough to listen. _Do you know how I saw your heart so quickly, precious girl?_ Asajj had asked. _It was not just the Force; it was in your face and your words and your rage._ She’d smiled, and it hadn’t been comforting in the least, all teeth and cutting edges. _Watch yourself. Not everyone’s so nice as me._

 _You’re not nice at all,_ Jyn had snapped back, but she’d taken the lesson to heart. The galaxy had taken enough from her already; no need to give it anything for free.

“Don’t get too close,” Andor advises. “She took me down with a baton in about a second. I wouldn’t put it past her to bite if she thinks it’d give her a chance to get out.”

Just for that, Jyn snaps her teeth at him, and while he does nothing so satisfying as flinch, he does shift his weight to attentive readiness. Enfys laughs.

“Well, if you’re not an Imp and you’re looking for work after this, we can always use a fighter,” Enfys says to Jyn, inexplicably cheerful. Her masked followers are still standing behind her, radiating a mix of boredom and attention and unease. Some have been here before; some are new. 

Jyn bites her tongue to hide how her words have deserted her, and jerks around at a flash of orange and white. Ahsoka, sans Hondo, frowning; Barriss Offee, stark and funereal at her side, her one hand clenched into a fist.

“Enfys,” Ahsoka says, “good to see you again. I’m sorry for the—mess.” Ahsoka, too, has lost her words, Jyn thinks, with a distant, bitter satisfaction. ‘Mess’ is woefully imprecise.

“Well, shall we?” Enfys inquires, and Barriss inclines her head and leads them back to the command center.

She’d gotten farther than she’d thought, Jyn realizes; the walk back takes several minutes, and running had seemed to take only seconds. Desperation, adrenaline: both will change perception. They’re old friends at this point, and familiar enough that Jyn knows to trust neither. She’d gotten farther than she’d realized at the time; she would’ve figured it out eventually. Humiliating, though, that it has to be on the march back to whence she fled, hands cuffed behind her back.

Wellspring is listening intently to Dormé and her other look-alike in the hub, while Thin-Nose and Red-Hair occasionally interject. They all swing their attention to the doors as Andor swipes them open; Wellspring, Leia no longer at her hip, is on the move immediately. 

“Lady Nest,” she says, extending her hand for a firm shake, which Enfys returns, bowing slightly. “Thank you for coming. We can talk in the conference room here. Dormé—”

“I will take care of it, Padmé,” Dormé answers, and that’s good enough for Wellspring, because she and Red-Hair leave, with Enfys and her masks, without another word. 

Dormé looks at Jyn for a moment, evaluative, and gestures to a second conference room. “I’m sure you’re tired of all the running around,” she says, calm laced with a thread of humor, a peace offering, a gesture of camaraderie if Jyn’s ever seen one, but Jyn resents it on principle, and bristles. 

In the conference room, Andor confiscates her baton, expression impassive now that he’s among his commanders and not one-on-one, or with the friend he’s apparently made in Enfys Nest.

Across from her, Dormé stands, backed by Wellspring’s look-alike, Thin-Nose, and Ahsoka and Barriss.

“The pilot?” Dormé asks Ahsoka quietly, as they settle into seats. They’re turned to each other like parentheses; Jyn can barely make out their words, but need sharpen her ears. She wants to know what happened to Hondo more than Dormé, probably.

Ahsoka shakes her head. “Took off before I caught up to him,” she says, but Jyn considers Ahsoka’s speed, Hondo’s collision with Enfys, the difficulty of flying out of Horizon’s hangar without clearance, and doubts.

Perhaps Dormé does, too, because she taps her finger once against the table, and says quietly, “Remember your loyalties, Ahsoka.”

On Ahsoka’s other side, Barriss shivers, like a womprat raising its hackles, and leans forward with a curled lip, but Ahsoka lays her hand over Barriss’ one, and says, matching Dormé for tone, “I never forgot them.”

There’s too much baggage here, Jyn thinks with disgust, as Barriss stands and leaves, tense and angry. Too much she doesn’t understand, just—just too much in general. She wants to slouch down in the chair, wants to rest her head on the table and let her bangs hide her from the interrogatory stares of the Jedi and spies. But she’s an adult, or so Asajj had told her, that last aching morning on Tatooine; that means responsibility, and consequences, and not behaving like a child, however much she wants to.

“Well, then,” says Dormé, folding her hands neatly on the table. Beside her, the look-alike does the same, an uncanny accuracy to the gesture. “General Draven—if you’ll excuse us?”

“You brought my agent into this, Lady Dalassene,” says Draven stiffly. “I’ll see this to whatever end I can.”

“That end is now.” Dormé’s expression doesn’t change, but her voice sings steel. It disavows contradiction. “Lieutenant Andor, thank you for your assistance. You may go.”

Andor looks at Jyn once more, those dark lovely eyes inscrutable, and then bows. “My lady,” he says, and exists swiftly. 

“This isn’t over,” Draven warns, and follows with poorly concealed anger. Some spymaster he is, Jyn thinks; Andor’s lightyears ahead of him.

“General Draven is very good at misdirecting perception,” says Dormé lightly; Jyn focuses her attention again. “He does not want you to fear him or be wary of his abilities. His greatest strength is encouraging others to underestimate him in person. That’s how he became the Alliance’s spymaster.”

“I thought that was your job,” Jyn says before she can think better of it, and Dormé smiles very faintly.

“My job is to be useful. To know things. Like Sabé, here. Like the rest of our sisters.”

“I don’t know what you think you know about me—” Jyn begins, but Dormé tilts her head, like a bird watching a worm, and interrupts her.

“I know the truth, Jyn,” she says kindly. “Would you like to share the rest of it?”

Never, _ever_ should’ve left Tatooine.

Jyn lifts her chin; over Dormé’s shoulder, Andor watches, attentive and inscrutable. “My reasons for joining the Rebellion are my own,” she says stiffly. “I didn’t think it necessary to relive them if it could be avoided.”

“But you gave yourself a new identity?” Ahsoka looks at her, compassion offered in the crease of her brow. 

“Like I said.” Jyn looks at her hands. Andor had taken her baton with him; she’ll have to steal it back from him, if the Rebellion doesn’t toss her in a prison hold. “I didn’t want to answer the questions my name would ask.”

“So you answered an entirely different question,” Sabé observes.

“I wanted to survive,” Jyn snaps. “That’s all I’ve wanted.”

“If that’s all, then why did you come with Asajj?” Ahsoka asks. Jyn tucks her chin to her chest to escape her stare. In her mind, Jyn feels as a cornered, wild thing, scrabbling at the walls for escape. But none of that will help her here, not still cuffed and unarmed, not with a Jedi and a spy and another Jedi and, blazes, that Andor waiting inscrutably beyond the doors.

“You’ve set yourself two drives, Jyn,” Dormé says. “Survival, and selflessness. They are rarely compatible. You hid your history to survive; you came here to help, knowing what a risk it would be.”

A laugh chokes out from her throat. “You give me far too much credit, my lady.”

“No,” Dormé says, all tenderness. “I think you haven’t been given enough.”

The words hit her like like a battering ram, a plasma cannon. She’d braced for cold, for an interrogation, not this kindness, not the offer of understanding, of sympathy. _A ploy, idiot girl,_ Asajj hisses in her ear, but Jyn wants to hope; she wants to be treated with kindness that doesn’t incur debt. 

Her mother’s faith presses warm between her breasts. Don’t trust the Force, Asajj had said. _Trust in yourself._ But she has no idea what she believes, what’s at stake. She’s made a mess of things, hasn’t she? Not denying her name to Dormé, not rejecting the idea that her interrogators seem to expect. Silence, concession, standoffishness. Asajj had never trained her to resist interrogation beyond a few tips tossed carelessly over the shoulder on a rare trip to Mos Espa; there had never been the need, and no time before departing Freetown. Stupid, stupid girl, not to have taken advantage of Asajj’s experience like this.

Stupid, stupid girl if she fails to wrest any advantage to her side now.

“What gave me up?” Jyn makes herself ask; Dormé might actually tell her, and it’d be stupid to waste the opportunity. 

Dormé’s mouth curves ruefully. “Bad luck,” she says. “Your family’s come up in some of my recent research.”

“You mean my father.”

“Your mother, actually,” Dormé corrects. “Your grandmother was renowned beyond Aria Prime for her art; and Lyra has been known to us since before the Empire. One of our best agents after its rise.”

Jyn’s heart stutters between her ribs. She’d known that her mother was involved in the Resistance—how else could she have Saw Guerrera’s priority holo frequency? But with the Naboo? That’s something else altogether. It’s like—thinking her mother knew _a_ rebel, to finding out she knew _the_ rebel. The scale of it dazzles, dizzies, draws out vertigo from some quiet, space-leery space inside her. 

Barriss Offee returns, bowing her head to Dormé and Ahsoka and Sabé. Sabé looks back at Jyn contemplatively. 

“Saw Guerrera vouches for you,” she says. “And from what the Lady Ventress tells us, you had barely half a year between your time with him and your time with her. Our desert friends know you from a month before you joined the runners. Where were you otherwise?”

Jyn clenches her jaw. “Running for my life,” she says shortly. “Saw abandoned me. Job went bad. I had to make my own way, and stay as far from the Imps as possible. That meant the Outer Rim.”

“Hard to get farther from the Empire than Tatooine,” Sabé says sympathetically. Her dark eyes are so warm, so understanding, that Jyn looks at her for a moment and sees Lyra’s eyes, but then Sabé blinks and the dark color overwrites the grey haunting Jyn’s dreams and doubts and guilt. 

“The Empire didn’t pick me up,” she says dully. “Not that you’ll believe me. No reason to. But they didn’t. I’m my own. And even if they did—they’ve nothing on me. They killed my family. Orphaned me. Killed my friends. Orphaned me again. I’ve nothing but hate for them. I’d never do a thing in their service.”

Sabé holds her gaze for a long moment, and then exchanges a look with Dormé and with Ahsoka. She rises, and rounds the table, and unlocks the cuffs with a quick hand. 

“I believe you, Jyn Erso,” she says, like absolution, and Jyn wants to rage, to weep, to scream with the extremes of the last few days, but Sabé is still on her knees, and the humility of her posture immobilizes. 

“I beg your pardon for the interrogation,” she continues. “But you understand what the survival of the Republic demands. It is greater than us all, than any insult we might offer to each other. And I beg you to remember that the safety of my daughter is second to nothing in my heart, and that I had to ascertain it for myself.”

Her face upturned, those eyes wide and imploring with kindness, Sabé looks so much like Lyra; so much like a mother, the ideal of a mother, that Jyn has carried with her when her mother’s face blurs in her mind’s eye. Lyra had killed for Jyn’s safety, had given herself over for the chance of her daughter’s survival. Sabé had questioned a possible enemy, who slipped into the Rebellion under a false name and been alone with her daughter. 

“Of course, my lady,” Jyn says thickly, tongue clumsy in her mouth. Some of what thrummed through her, that maternal resonance, must register to Sabé, because she rises and helps Jyn, too, to stand.

“Then, if you will accept it—may I offer you a post with my family, to help look after Leia?”

Across the table, in the corner of Jyn’s eye, Dormé starts, but Sabé does not look to her or to Ahsoka; her gaze is steadfast and calm. 

Jyn swallows. “I am not sure that your—that Wellspring would approve, my lady.”

“My wife and I are equals, and she trusts me to make decisions in her stead,” Sabé says calmly, unperturbed, but her mouth has softened. “Is that your only objection?”

“I’m not good with younglings,” Jyn blurts. “Not even when I was one. Girls are monsters—no disrespect meant, lady—”

“It’s true.” Sabé’s eyes twinkle, and she smiles fully. “Girls are monsters. And what a wonderful thing to be! And Leia and Artoo tell me you were very good with them this morning. And, of course, you will not be alone; you will be with us. We none of us expect tasks of import to be accomplished unaided, Jyn. We help each other.”

Jyn dares a glance around the table. Ahsoka offers a small nod of encouragement; Dormé watches with keen-eyed reserve. Behind the transparisteel walls, Andor frowns; at the door, Leia stands with Artoo, watching somberly. Jyn thinks of Leia, alone and lonely and aching with it, how Jyn knows that feeling too well, how both of them carry loss like a lodestone, a crystal strung round their necks; how Leia laughed, once, and how Jyn longed for her to laugh again. 

“If you’re certain,” Jyn says at last, “I would be honored, my lady.”

From the door, Leia grins at her, quick and sharp, her small teeth bright, and Jyn returns it before she thinks better of doing so, baring her teeth. Monsters indeed, and wondrously so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anyway grad school is eating me alive. this was supposed to be longer (expect chapter count to increase) but i needed to get it posted before i conned myself into not being here for another year. which is not a plan! but. grad school. send prayers 4 ur local gay disaster and loving reminder:
> 
> DON'T FUCKING FORGET TO VOTE NOVEMBER 6!!!!!!!!!


	6. six: barriss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quietly, Ahsoka whispers, “I don’t want you to go to Kuat.”
> 
> Just as quietly, Barriss answers. “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IN CELEBRATION OF A NEW HOPE--i mean. the star wars trailer. I have hope agaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain.
> 
> with many many thanks to jo for looking the first bit over like, four months ago, ON CHRISTMAS, and walking me back from a dangerous pitfall. if I've fallen in anyway, it's entirely my fault, and I'm eager to listen.

Barriss waves the door to their suite closed, and rests on the edge of their bed. Her boots close with snaps; she undoes them carefully. It’s easy enough to do, and one thing she’d picked up when she’d lost—sacrificed, really—her arm, and denied herself a prosthetic. She rolls her feet, toe to ball to heel, still in thick bantha-wool socks, and pads across to the ’fresher, where Ahsoka is staring into the mirror.

Times like these, she misses a second arm, misses how easy it might once have been to embrace Ahsoka, wrap herself snugly and unshakably around her lekku and waist. But Barriss can still slip her one arm under Ahsoka’s and over her belly, can still press her face, unveiled, into the smooth, dry space between neck and lekku. She can still kiss the skin there that shines like a dying star. 

It’s a miracle, still, that Ahsoka allows this, that Barriss can permit this to herself without sliding into the morass of recrimination and despair that lingers on the edge of her consciousness. A miracle, how Ahsoka sighs and sags, trusting Barriss to hold her, and turns to press their brows together, noses brushing delicately, a quiet moment of comfort. 

“I should have been more careful,” Ahsoka murmurs at last. The specter of Leia, alone with a stranger, weighs on her shoulders. 

“She is safe.” Barriss brushes a kiss to her cheek, that dangerous curve of white. Privately, she thinks Leia was never in danger: Skywalker’s daughter has all his strength in the Force, and all of Amidala’s control. She trains with Kenobi and Ahsoka daily; she is more than a match for some Force-null teenager. But the principle is the problem: a stranger slipped into a position of authority, of power over Leia Naberrie, and was almost undetected. If not for Dormé—

No. “You trust too easily,” Barriss says quietly. It was Ventress who brought Jyn Erso to Horizon, to Ahsoka, to Leia. 

“If we cannot trust our allies, then who can we trust?” 

Ventress is not an ally; Barriss bites the words back. They have had this discussion many times, always to stalemate, always to Ventress remaining and returning and reminding them of her utility. What point is there to having it now, when Ahsoka knows of her error, when she is so burdened by it? When she finally left Dagobah to rejoin Ahsoka, Barriss swore to herself that she would not make Ahsoka suffer again. She will not do so now.

“Soka—let’s go to bed.”

Ahsoka allows herself to be led from the ’fresher, allows Barriss to pull her synthleathers from her shoulders, her pants from her hips. She stands quietly, allowing Barriss to ease a soft sweater over her arms and around her lekku, soft sleep-pants over her fine-boned feet, wool socks that Barriss had knit over her toes. She sighs at the end of it, and turns into Barriss’ arm, and rests her brow on Barriss’ shoulder. 

Once, this quiet, undemanding intimacy screamed like a wound in the dark of Barriss’ mind. Like something she was not meant to have; something she stole from the galaxy and its will. Now, it is a faint ache, and she can permit herself to find peace in the warmth of Ahsoka’s body, the softness of her trust.

“You haven’t asked about Hondo,” Ahsoka murmurs as they settle under the blankets, face to face. 

“Should I?”

The corner of Ahsoka’s mouth quirks, wry amusement pulsing through their awareness of each other in the Force. 

Quietly, Ahsoka whispers, “I don’t want you to go to Kuat.”

Just as quietly, Barriss answers. “I know.”

 _I don’t want you to go alone to Naboo,_ Barriss doesn’t say. Ahsoka knows. She can’t not know. To follow her anywhere, everywhere: this is what Barriss promised, when they were both still fresh from the Purges, before Barriss had let her leave alone from Dagobah. It is a promise she has been able to keep; when she leaves, it is on Ahsoka’s orders. But now—

“Will you be alright with Luminara?” Ahsoka asks.

“I will,” says Barriss. It’s not a lie. They’ve reconciled, as much as is possible, since Barriss’ betrayal. They can work together. It might even be something of a comfort, to follow Master Unduli again; if she cannot be with Ahsoka, it is the next best thing.

Ahsoka traces her hairline, the bone of her jaw, down to her chin. “Hondo—you were right about him. There was only so long he’d work with us. I think Asajj bought him.”

Buy loyalty once, and you’ll always have to buy it again. Honor with a price is no honor at all. 

“He said to take care what I asked of him, and to take care with Hal—Erso. Jyn. He may help us yet, but he’ll look to Asajj first.”

“Hondo Ohnaka looks to himself first,” Barriss corrects. 

“Yes,” Ahsoka says. She looks so very tired, worn and weary, and it’s a privilege to see her like this, to be trusted with this vulnerability. They have seen each other at their worst, she and Ahsoka, and they survived it. If they cannot be open to each other, there is no one else.

Barriss shouldn’t like that thought as much as she does, but it curls in her belly, over the rungs of her ribs, like a lick of flame. She’s long since lost any pretension of goodness, and she knows that Ahsoka is healthier than she is, that Ahsoka can confide in the Naboo sisters, in Shaak Ti, in Mace Windu, even, in ways that Barriss can’t—but Ahsoka is a leader. She has grown into that role in ways that the Jedi could not help her, and that means, in the end, a veiling of weakness. Like Barriss’ own veil, it is one that is shucked when they are alone together. 

“I can feel you,” Ahsoka whispers. Exhaustion is an ember in her eyes, smoldering into new life. Her mouth curves, warm and generous; her hand slips to Barriss’ throat, and Ahsoka pulls her forward, noses brushing, until their mouths find each other. 

Kissing like this is Barriss’ favorite. After ten years—three of building to and waiting for each other, seven since their waiting ended—they know each other so well. The warm press of Ahsoka’s mouth, the daring slide of her tongue as she pulls back slightly, is achingly familiar. Barriss feels it like her phantom limb when they’re apart, when it’s been too long. The taste of Ahsoka’s dental cleaner, the mint tea they’d shared with Padmé and Dormé before departing Horizon, the salt of the meat Ahsoka had eaten for dinner; the smell of her soap and her sweat, the metallic tang of recycled water—all this is home. 

Where Ahsoka is, is home. 

Barriss squeezes her eyes shut and presses forward, desperate to keep the bitter swell of misery at bay for this. And Ahsoka knows her with terrible, absolving intimacy, so she allows the change in pace, and deepens the kiss in turn.

It becomes a hot, wet, a slick chase of tongue, the sharp nip of teeth, sliding from tenderly amused to more intent, more interested, and Barriss can feel Ahsoka burning into a blaze in the Force, too, a star gathering in nebula. Times like these, she misses her arm the most; what it would be like to hold Ahsoka’s wrists with one hand and seek lower with the other, to stroke her lekku, to cup breast and palm hole at once. But passion is a double-edged blade, and her altercation with Ventress aside, Barriss is relieved to have the excuse not to wield or suffer its cutting edge.

Ahsoka pulls back. “Do you want—?” she asks, a little breathless. Her lips shine with kisses. 

“Please,” Barriss hisses, and Ahsoka grins, sharp-toothed, a little feral, so beautifully sure of Barriss’ wanting for her.

“I want to ride you,” Ahsoka whispers, “your hand on my tails, your mouth on me—let me—”

Barriss feels behind her for the edge of the bed, the drawer of their clothes, the box at its back. “Shields up?” One mortifying morning-after was bad enough; she’d like to avoid it, when they’re not alone on the ship, Luminara and Mothma and Draven and his protégé on board. 

“Yes,” Ahsoka says, and rolls Barriss onto her back, climbing over her, a bruising kiss pressed to her mouth, the underside of her jaw, and Barriss forgets what she was doing, for a moment, as the Force settles around them, strong as plasma and shimmering when she looks for the shield in the corner of her mind. 

Ahsoka sits up, lekku swaying, their dildo held triumphantly in her fist. It makes an absurd trophy, and Barriss—cracks into laughter, hiding her face in her hand, wheezing as Ahsoka shakes above her with glee. “The look on your face,” Barriss gasps, and Ahsoka laughs, kissing her hand, tonguing the space between her fingers like a cat until Barriss settles her hand instead at Ahsoka’s waist, slipping her fingers under the hem of Ahsoka’s sweater to feel smooth skin, strong muscles. Ahsoka kisses her; noses bumping, eyelashes tickling her cheek, her mouth searing a smile into Barriss’ skin. 

How much work it took to get here. How much work it takes to stay. And it is work: were they not to part after Nova, there might still be distance between them from the mess with Ventress, and that’s Barriss’ fault, and she needs to do better. But it doesn’t mean she can’t have this, can’t clutch this love greedily to her body and wish for it to sink into her bones. 

“Pants,” Ahsoka says, when they break apart. “Let me—your pants—”

They unfasten easily enough, and Ahsoka pushes them and the socks down over Barriss’ knobby ankles, and Barriss tries to fold them while Ahsoka unclasps her top, wanting to spare them being kicked to the floor and catching dust. But then Ahsoka is shirtless, sweater shucked and tossed aside, her breasts beautifully full, nipples peaking in the chill, and Barriss quite forgets what she was doing. What can she do, when offered such a sight, but pull herself upright and take that warm weight in her hand, her mouth? And the sound Ahsoka makes, a low lovely moan, goes right to Barriss’ core. Good thing her pants are off; they’d need laundering with how wet she is. 

Ahsoka accepts this devotion: she holds Barriss’ head to her breast, eyes squeezed shut, an _ahh_ reeding out into the air, as desolate as Mirialan winter wind. Her other hand skates down between them, underneath the pants that Ahsoka still, somehow, has on. Barriss waits, and relishes the way Ahsoka shivers when she strokes her clit for the first time. 

“Get your pants off,” Barriss whispers, and blows gently on the nipple she’d just been mouthing. “I want to be inside you.”

Shivering again, Ahsoka rises to her knees, and with beloved gracelessness sheds her pants. The strain of muscle at her hip beg for a nip of teeth where the skin stretches over bone and sinew. At her groin, the skin streaks softly into blue and white, the same tissue of her lekku so smooth under Barriss’ searching fingers, slick where she presses up and in.

“Barriss,” whispers Ahsoka, and Barriss drags her gaze up, past coppery skin and dark lips to the arresting blue of Ahsoka’s eyes. “Barriss—please.”

“Ready for me, are you?” Barriss murmurs, and presses more firmly over Ahsoka’s entrance, triggering another slow slide of slick. She strokes over the mons, entrance to clit, everywhere the blue-white skin reaches. After so long, she is intimately familiar with how sensitive Ahsoka is here, at the border between blue-white and orange. Her mouth waters; she wants to twist them over, put Ahsoka on her back or drag her up to sit on Barriss’ face, to wrap the Force around those strong arms and make Ahsoka stay in place while Barriss eats her out. But this is about what Ahsoka wants, tonight, and Ahsoka wants to be filled.

Barriss withdraws her fingers and lifts her hips so Ahsoka can fit the harness. The dildo bobs in the air, its base pressing against Barriss’ vulva. She’s never really liked being penetrated, but the tantalizing pressure does her nicely, especially when Ahsoka gets going, all sinuous hips and warrior’s rhythm. 

Ahsoka snaps the last fastening into place, and arcs her spine down, pressing a kiss to Barriss’ stomach, and it’s just shy of too much, of overwhelming, and Barriss can’t take it, can’t endure it. “Come on,” she says, shivering under Ahsoka’s hands, and Ahsoka nips at the skin just below Barriss’ breast with those sharp carnivore’s teeth. Stars: they bloom in Barriss’ vision, and Ahsoka rises, sets the dildo to the lip of her cunt, and sinks down. 

Hips flush, Barriss can feel the slick of Ahsoka’s arousal dripping around the dildo, the softness of fat and strength of muscle splayed warm over Barriss’ hipbones. She trembles; Ahsoka stares at her, blue eyes shocked wide with impact. 

“Ready,” Barriss breathes; Ahsoka shifts, nudging the dildo’s bulbous base against Barriss’ clit and labia, and lifts off a few centimeters, before settling back down again. 

“I want to stay like this,” Ahsoka says, dropping her head, lekku swaying over Barriss’ breasts and shoulders, “you inside me, around me.”

 _You’re the one who sends me away,_ Barriss thinks, and doesn’t say; instead, she levers herself up, abdominals clenching with the effort, and sets her mouth to the sensitive skin of Ahsoka’s lekku, the softness of her throat. Her hand finds Ahsoka’s breast and presses tight. 

Ahsoka whines; the sound vibrates from vocal chords to skin to Barriss’ mouth, and Barriss holds it there, the memory inscribing itself into her brain: the salty taste, the buzzing feel, the warmth of Ahsoka’s skin, the damp press of her thighs around Barriss’ hips as she rocks, a tight, desperate movement. Barriss cants her hips down, rocks back up, fast and filthy; she sets her teeth over Ahsoka’s clavicle and bites down.

Ahsoka cries out, a sob, grief and ecstasy bound up together. Her hands thread through Barriss’ hair, holding tight; she strains between the teeth at her collarbone and hand at her breast and the dildo, fat and dripping, grinding up into her hole, against their clits. Barriss snakes her arm around Ahsoka’s back, stroking that dear strong spine, the graceful curve of her lekku, and clutches them together. Between the heat of their bodies, their breasts press airlessly together, and Ahsoka sobs, turning her face into Barriss’ neck, hips twitching unevenly against Barriss’. Barriss can feel the tremor in Ahsoka’s stomach, a translation of the clench of her cunt. 

_I don’t want you to go,_ Ahsoka had said, earlier. Her body says it for her again now.

 _Don’t make me,_ Barriss thinks, and hopes the thought stays hidden. _I don’t want to part from you,_ she thinks, and hopes her body says it for her.

Ahsoka comes, like falling, on the down-stroke of cunt-on-dildo, her face creased into the shelter of Barriss’ shoulder, Barriss’ fingers firm and deliberate on her central lekku. She rests like that, abdomen spasming against Barriss’ for a minute longer, shuddering in the cool cabin air. 

Barriss holds her through it, stroking lekku and spine, twisting her neck to kiss every swath of skin she can reach without disturbing Ahsoka too much. This was never about her own pleasure; it coils low in her abdomen, at the tendons and thin skin at the join of her thighs. Ahsoka will see her done, anyway, once she’s recovered.

In the meantime, she holds Ahsoka close, and squeezes her eyes shut, and wills the Force to make itself kind, for once, and stretch the time to last around them. 

 

 

Luminara is waiting for her in the galley. 

Barriss registers her presence, registers Luminara doing the same. She does not slow or hesitate, but continues. Luminara’s air of grim anticipation forbids any weakness on Barriss’ part. 

Luminara nods at her, and waits until Barriss has taken her seat and her tea—none of the horrible caff Ahsoka downs in the mornings—before broaching the subject.

“I heard a most curious story before departing Horizon,” she says.

“Pilots gossip more than any other profession.” Barriss stirs a splash of milk, a spoonful of honey into her tea. “Surely the Clone Wars taught us how little their stories can be relied upon.”

“Did you duel Ventress?”

Barriss stirs. The surface of her tea curls in itself, like a whirlpool, a gravity well. “I did.”

Luminara says, “I fail to understand your objections, then.”

“It’s not the same thing at all.”

“Hells it isn’t,” Luminara snaps. “You raised your blade against another. One pilot even told me that you started the fight. It’s Leia’s doing at all that you didn’t kill Ventress outright. How, in practical terms, is it different than taking up your saber again, in service of a just cause?”

“It is entirely different,” Barriss grits out. How many times have they worn through this argument? “Foolish as it was, my decision to attack Ventress was _mine._ It was commanded by none. The only motivations I followed were mine, there was no chance of corruption.”

“And you think there is chance of corruption here, now? From the Alliance, from _me?”_

“You told me time and again that the Clone Wars were fulfillment of our duty as Jedi. That there was justice in our crimes against the Separatists. That the fight to preserve the Republic was _just._ It was not. Forgive me if I do not trust so easily again.”

Luminara opens her mouth, and closes it again, lips pressing into a thin, severe line. She says coldly, “I have a prosthetic prepared for you. When you are ready—”

“Enough.” Ahsoka’s voice cuts through the air. “It is Barriss’ choice, and she has chosen. You will let her be, Master Unduli.”

“We are going to an active battle zone,” says Luminara. “She must be ready for combat.”

“Barriss does not need a lightsaber to serve the Alliance,” says Ahsoka coolly. The words shiver unnervingly down Barriss’ spine. “Nor does she need a prosthetic to fight, as her duel with Ventress demonstrated. In fact, given that she has lived ten years without one, trying to adjust to one now would likely hurt more than help.”

Barriss pushes away from the table, tea abandoned. “Excuse me,” she says, and slips away.

“Barriss—” says Ahsoka, but Barriss ignores her, and makes for one of the gunner’s towers. 

She changes tack halfway. There’s no time to waste by wallowing. She’s to leave with Luminara tonight. Better pack.

 

 

In the room she shares with Ahsoka, the Force leaps to Barriss’ fingertips like a cat after light. She pulls out her medkit from the top shelf of the closet with the Force, and opens it with the Force. She bundles her bedroll and checks the expiration on her ration packs, the wiring on her comm. In different systems, it will be insufficient to reach Ahsoka, Kuat to Naboo; she will not see or hear Ahsoka until they are reunited, or Kuat’s communications are captured. Barriss’ eyes burn; she wipes them angrily, and closes her medkit. 

“Barriss,” says Ahsoka softly from the doorway.

Barriss whirls around. Her skirts flare about her ankles. “I am not a weapon.”

Ahsoka holds her gaze levelly. “Of course not,” she says. “You’re a person. You’re Barriss.”

The two are not mutually exclusive. Barriss squeezes her eyes shut. Her hand clenches at her hip.

“Barriss—” says Ahsoka. “Can I—?”

A low sound dredges from the depths of her throat. Her shoulder, socket empty, aches with phantom pain, self-hatred blistering a limb that is no longer anything but a ghost. Ahsoka comes to her quickly. 

“I’m sorry,” Ahsoka whispers, holding her so tenderly, “I’m sorry—”

Barriss’ lips are stiff, unbending. She forces the words out: “It’s not your fault.”

“I’m not faultless,” Ahsoka says quietly. “I should’ve been more careful; I was trying to offer a rationale Luminara would accept.”

“I know,” Barriss whispers. Her mouth drags across Ahsoka’s skin with the words. In her mind, she sees that stock image of the old holodramas: a prisoner, shackled, heavy metal chaining them to an anchoring ball. Her guilt is her anchor. Her need for absolution. Her incapability, to be what Luminara wants.

Because that’s the heart of it, Barriss realizes dully. Luminara, more than any of them except Yoda, is caught on the thorns of the past, rent raw and bleeding with a thousand cuts. Luminara wants the Barriss she thought she had, the Barriss she did have in the early days of the Clone Wars, when Barriss was still her Padawan and the world seemed simpler. 

Nothing was ever simple. But even the cleverest and most brilliant can catch on the veil of nostalgia. None of them are exempt. Not even Luminara.

Ahsoka breathes in, uneven, as though on the precipice of speech. Her lips shape words her tongue does not speak. _I don’t want you to go,_ her silence says. _I would go with you,_ whispers the catch of her lip on Barriss’ neck. _We could leave it all behind,_ the heart keens, _go back to the homes we never knew, hunt barefoot on Shili or walk veiled across the ice of Mirial. We could save each other from this. We could learn quiet that the battlefield could not touch._

Or maybe it’s just Barriss who thinks that. Mace Windu once accused her of clinging ruinously to her ideology, but Ahsoka believes, Ahsoka would never abandon a cause, a people to whom she dedicated herself. Barriss is not so noble. If there were a chance Ahsoka would go willingly, Barriss would spirit them away in the next instant, but—but if Ahsoka allowed it, would she be the being Barriss loves?

It doesn’t matter. There is no version of Ahsoka whom Barriss cannot love. Her mind has gifted her that, if nothing else. And the Empire would find them, its authority leaching across the galaxy like an oil spill on a sea. Retreat is no option at all; it has not been since Barriss came back from Dagobah. As in all other things, she will endure, until the enemy has failed or ground her into dust. The heart wants what it wants, but it must want in silence. There has never been an alternative. 

 

 

“Show me,” Barriss says at Nova, and Leia obeys. The tendons in her hand tense until they look about to snap in two; probing her aura, Barriss finds neither light nor dark, but pure concentration, pure will. Power. 

Light sparks at the tips of Leia’s tiny fingers, crackles over the lifeline of her palm. 

“Careful now,” Barriss breathes, mesmerized. “How does it feel?”

“Like wires,” says Leia. “Like starfire.”

“See if you can charge the battery, then,” Barriss says. “Like we talked about.”

Leia squeezes her eyes shut tight. She reaches the hand pale with lightning to the battery. It crackles and snaps like resinous wood burning. A strain of it leaps to the charging port on the battery, and pulses with beads of energy, until they travel one by one into the battery and vanish. Leia sags back, sweating at her brow. 

“Well done,” Barriss says. “It’s—87 percent charged now. That’s much better than last time.”

“Not all the way,” Leia grouses, but allows herself to be pulled into Barriss’ side. “I'll keep practicing.”

“I know. But that’s not all. Let me see your hand.”

The skin over Leia’s palm is pink and raw, as though burned against a hot pot, an overheated engine. 

“That’s no good,” says Barriss. “I’ve a salve in my bag. Shall I fetch it or you?”

But Leia stirs before Barriss even finishes speaking, and the salve floats toward them like a surveillance drone. 

“You’ve so much control,” Barriss murmurs, uncapping the salve with a thread of the Force. “And the power to match. How marvelous you are.”

“Have to be,” Leia mutters. The salve, smelling of stingwax and oil and spearmint, shines over her skin, even as Barriss pauses.

“Leia,” she says. “Darling girl. You need be nothing you do not wish to be.”

Leia looks at her, and her eyes are sharp and feral and fierce. “I have to get Luke back.”

“Your mother will get Luke back. Ahsoka and I and the Aunties will get Luke back. Your job is to be safe, to keep yourself safe.”

Leia quiets. When she speaks again, she says: “I’ve seen him.”

Barriss’ blood runs cold. She thinks of Obi-Wan and Yoda, their conversations with Qui-Gon Jinn. The revenants that dodge her unsteady mind. The slow death of a Mirialian winter.

“Leia,” she whispers, “what do you mean?”

“He’s not dead,” Leia says firmly. “And it’s not a dream. He called to me, and I saw him in a dark room under a black cloak. And—I was a shadow between him and a man with fire for eyes.”

“Does Obi-Wan know?” Barriss says urgently. She pulls Leia to her feet, salve forgotten. “Did you tell anyone else about this?”

“No,” says Leia, surprised. “Why—”

“Come,” says Barriss, “we must tell them. Quickly.” 

 

 

If Leia truly saw Luke, and Barriss is inclined to believe her—her control, her power, shared with her twin, surely that creates a bond that even a galaxy cannot break; and the man with fire for eyes must be Sith, must be Vader, who last took Luke—then the threat of surveillance is undeniable. Anakin was like no other Jedi the Temple had ever seen. He, with Obi-Wan, had redefined what was possible through the Force. If he sensed Leia’s presence, there is no telling if he might be able to catch it, track it, find her and them. 

There’s no telling how the Dark Side has augmented his abilities. 

 

 

They find Sabé first, speaking quietly with the Erso girl Ventress had smuggled into their midst. 

“Sabé,” Barriss says sharply, “where is Wellspring?”

Sabé’s large dark eyes flit over her, over Leia, deep as a gravity well. She reaches unerringly for Leia, who takes her hand and—a rarity, these days—allows herself to be pulled into her mother’s skirts.

“The command hub,” Sabé says, “with Obi-Wan and Ahsoka. What’s going on, Barriss?”

“An unexpected threat has arisen,” Barriss says, and begins striding down the hall. “Come on.”

She hears Sabé usher Erso with them, hears-without-hearing Leia’s watchful, wary confusion coalescing into suspicion. They move briskly down the hall, all but running as adrenaline sharpens Barriss’ anxieties unbearably. She is certain that her heart is audible outside her body, that she is broadcasting, but it’s not until they actually approach the hub that Ahsoka’s signature in the Force veers abruptly towards them, and Ahsoka herself opens the door ahead of them.

“Barriss,” she says, “what’s—?”

“Obi-Wan,” Barriss interrupts. His blue eyes, tired and washed-out in the fluorescent light, sharpen as he looks up from his star charts. Behind him, reclining in a chair with datapads scattered around her, Padmé Amidala looks up, curious and alert. Luminara is on the other side of the table, in conference with Yoda via hologram. 

“Master Yoda,” Barriss says, “Luminara. I have a question regarding the Force. Is it possible to track another’s Force-signature across the galaxy, if one witnesses its projection?”

Save for the ambient hum of electronics, the hub is silent. Obi-Wan looks bloodless, Luminara faint, her tattoos stark on her cheeks. Padmé sets down her datapad.

“In theory, perhaps,” Yoda says eventually. “Difficult, it would be, without a bond. Much easier does connection make things.”

“What about an unknown bond?” Barriss demands.

“He doesn’t even know she exists,” Sabé whispers. “How could he—why are you asking?”

“Leia projected to Luke,” Barriss says. “I have reason to believe Vader witnessed it, at least in part.”

“Leia,” Padmé breathes, white as the walls around her. The datapad falls from nerveless hands, and she reaches for her daughter, falling to her knees out of the seat. “Leia, why—Leia, come here.”

Leia goes, and stares at her mother, allows herself again to be pulled in close. A strange child, Barriss has always known, more so since her brother’s abduction, alien with power. Her strangeness draws up Barriss’ spine like ice.

“What reason?” Sabé sounds strangled; she crosses from behind Barriss to Padmé and Leia. Normally so unflappable, her hands tremble as she presses them to Leia’s shoulders, Padmé’s nape.

“I saw Luke,” Leia says. “I stood between him and a man with fire for eyes. I was the shadow he cast over my brother.”

“Have you felt him since?” Ahsoka asks urgently. “Either of them?”

“Matter, it does not,” Yoda says sharply. “Too great a risk, it is. Too unpredictable, Vader is. Too unknown, the power of the Dark Side. To Naboo, she must not go.”

“She is my _daughter,_ ” Padmé snarls. In this moment, she looks so like her daughter: the wild, unswayed ferocity in her eyes promise death to anything separating her from her family. “She stays with me.”

Obi-Wan looks at Barriss, Luminara, Ahsoka. His face breaks, wretched.

Luminara says, not without kindness, “If she stays with you—with any of our main branches—she may act as a beacon to Vader. He will track her and find us. It will endanger everything for which we have suffered and strived.”

“I don’t care,” Padmé snaps. “I have lost my son already—I have lost my husband, I have lost more friends than I can count—I will not lose what I have left.”

“Padmé,” Sabé whispers, stricken. “Padmé—what of Naboo?”

The aftermath of the word hangs in the air. Standing in a blast radius would be easier, Barriss thinks. The silence after a sonic bomb, after a blaster’s report, is easier to bear. There is finitude there. Here, the future looms, colossal and terrible, once again waiting on the choice of Padmé Amidala. 

“Padmé,” says Obi-Wan. It is the first time he has spoken since Barriss arrived. His voice cracks, and he is no Jedi master, no affable uncle or mentor or friend: he is a man broken by what the galaxy has given him, by the weight of too many worlds to count. Even without any particular fondness for Obi-Wan—Barriss would describe them as allies, or colleagues if they were getting on especially well—it hurts to see him, to hear him. He is pain made flesh, a wound that inflicts itself on those around it. He is a hurt they must all bear.

“Padmé,” he says again.

Padmé looks at him. “You promised.”

“It seems,” he says, “that I have failed you again.”

“Padmé,” Sabé says. She touches Padmé’s cheek, the gesture and look almost unbearably intimate. “My love. Do not forget the promises you have made, too.”

Padmé looks at her for a long moment.

Then Leia says, “Mom?”

Padmé clutches her to her breast. Barriss has to look away. “Leia,” says Padmé, “my brave, brilliant star. I need you to be strong for me.”

Sabé kneels beside them. “Fierce like a dragon, Leia.”

Leia looks at them, around the room. Her eyes catch Barriss’, but flit away. 

“I don’t want to go,” she says.

Padmé squeezes her eyes shut. “I don’t want you to go, either. Dearest girl. Blood of my blood, bone of my bone. But you understand that you must?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Leia whispers. It is almost too faint to hear. “I just wanted Luke.”

“I know, my darling,” says Sabé. 

“I didn’t understand the consequences of my actions,” Leia says quietly. “This does not absolve me.”

The words sound rehearsed, learned deeply.

“That’s right,” says Padmé, and presses her brow to Leia’s. A tear tracks down her cheek. 

Sabé rises. “Jyn,” she says, “pack your things. You too, Ahsoka. Where is Dormé?”

“Mandalore,” supplies Obi-Wan.

“Stars,” Sabé murmurs. “Ahsoka—?”

“I think it’s best if we keep a low profile,” Ahsoka says. “Three is enough. More and we might draw attention to ourselves. Jyn and Leia can pose as sisters. I can be a family friend. It’ll work out.”

Barriss opens her mouth and closes it. Foolish, to hope. Foolish to think this changed anything.

“Where will you go?” Padmé asks, but Sabé cuts her off immediately. 

“Don’t tell us, Ahsoka. Make contact through Fulcrum if you must, but do not contact us unless there is no other choice, not until we have retaken the Republic.”

Again that violent light animates Padmé’s eyes, but it fades just as quickly. She bows her head to her daughter’s. 

“Dearest,” she says. “We will be together again. All of us. I swear it to you.”

Leia looks at her, inscrutable, implacable. But she nods, and hugs her mother tightly, and Barriss turns away to Ahsoka. Her heart, she buries down beneath her ribs where it cannot trouble her.

“You’ll take our ship,” she says. Not a question. A miracle, that her voice holds steady. “I’m off with Luminara, anyway. Take it.”

“Barriss,” Ahsoka says tenderly, “I need a ship unaffiliated with the Alliance. If I take our ship, it will be to the nearest scrapyard to trade. No, I have another idea. We’ll take a shuttle.”

“That won’t get you anywhere,” Barriss hisses. “Once the fleets leave Nova, you’ll be alone in space.”

“It doesn’t need to get me anywhere. He’ll come to us.”

It comes to her at once. “Sith hells. Tell me it’s not who I’m thinking.”

“It’s not who you’re thinking,” Ahsoka says easily, so easily that Barriss for a moment doubts herself. But reason reasserts itself quickly enough. There are only so many smugglers Ahsoka knows who will come when she calls.

She keeps her voice low, to not attract the attention of the others. “Ahsoka. Do _not_ forget what we discussed. He cannot be trusted.”

“Barriss,” Ahsoka says. Her hands wrap warm around Barriss’, the pressure meant to reassure. “Don’t worry about me. I know what I’m doing.”

 

 

In its bone-and-marrow cage, her heart rails and rages and weeps. To love is to worry, to fear, to be driven by those worries and fears. So the Jedi taught. In this moment, Barriss understands why, when she has so rarely before. How can she go on? She cannot. But she must. She will.

 _Take me with you,_ the heart whispers, _let us never be sundered, let our lives be so closely bound that they will not know my bones from yours when they find our bodies._

 _She will be so alone,_ the fear says insidiously. _So alone, only a child and the Erso girl Ventress planted with her, and the man who was Anakin Skywalker hunting her through the stars. She will need you, and you will not be there._

Barriss squeezes her eyes shut. It is writ plain on her face, as clear as her tattoos, she is certain, the hurting heart and the vice of fear. Lucky, then, that Ahsoka is not here, is in a shuttle in the infinite emptiness of space with the girl Ventress planted and the child she must protect, a shuttle Barriss can barely see from Nova’s viewing deck. 

_I love you,_ Ahsoka had said to her, mouth pressed soft to her ear just a moment before boarding. Barriss had stared back, unable to speak. Ahsoka had smiled. _I know, you love me, too._

And that, Barriss thinks, watching the silver glint of the shuttle grow smaller and smaller, is why the Jedi were wrong. Where would Barriss be without Ahsoka’s love? Without her love for Ahsoka? She fears and worries and doubts the future, but she has faith in Ahsoka, believes in Ahsoka, trusts Ahsoka. And because Ahsoka has faith in her, Barriss can go on. Because of that faith, she must go on; she will. It is the only choice she can make. It is the only thing that matters. 

In her chamber, she finishes packing her kit. The prosthetic is on the bed; Luminara must have put it there while she worked with Leia. Barriss leaves it in Nova’s medbay and doesn’t look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> re: the pitfall.
> 
> So a lot is going on here vis à vis Barriss' disability. This is something I've wanted to write for a while, and for various (giant cast) reasons, haven't been able to. There's a one shot coming at the end of all this that'll hopefully give me more room to explore that. 
> 
> I'm not physically disabled like this, myself. In writing Barriss previously, I've drawn on my own experiences with depression. In writing this experience, I'm drawing on that, my academic engagement in disability studies, and, I confess, my own experiences with debilitating physical injury that transformed into chronic pain and, depending on humidity and strain, a limp; and my sheer clumsiness recently causing me to break my foot. Of course, while one can lead to the other, injury IS NOT the same as disability, and I don't suggest that my experience in this area is in any way equivalent to someone who, through injury or birth, doesn't have one or both arms. 
> 
> tl;dr: I probably fucked up, writing this. I tried not to, but if there's a way you think it could be written more sensitively and compassionately, please drop a line in the comments. I'm always willing to listen. 
> 
> Love to you all, and since there won't be an update by then, a very Happy Early Star Wars Day. May the Force be with you.


End file.
